Yeah, but they do come pre-installed on most distributions.
I don't know what "pre-installed" is supposed to mean. Gnome/Gtk+ are optional packages in almost all distributions.
Java doesn't. I just wonder why that is so.
You might ask why Java isn't part of the RedHat or Debian package systems. There is actually lots of demand, but unfortunately, Sun's licensing policies make this difficult. It's too bad Sun can't market themselves out of a paper bag. However, the Sun JDK is trivial to install. Also, Debian, RedHat, and other systems include several other Java implementations.
Could it be that *gasp* Java is not popular?!
Java, while clearly not perfect, is wildly popular: it is taught widely in colleges, is part of the AP exam, is used extensively in research, and is one of the most popular platforms for building enterprise appliactions. It's a shame that the most vocal Linux proponents seem to be so hostile to it. And it's particularly regrettable that people like de Icaza are off on a wild goose chase with a less mature Java clone called "C#".
If it wasn't written in Java, you wouldn't be getting it at all, since it would be Windows-only (or, at best, FLTK or wxWindows).
The download isn't 3.4M, it's about 1M.
The Java runtime download isn't 14M, it's about 9M.
You seem to be assuming that Gnome/Gtk is somehow free while Java needs to be downloaded. Why? The Gnome/Gtk libraries, as well as the C support libraries, are huge downloads. I remember last time I installed a basic Gnome desktop, I needed to download about 20-30M.
Sun's Java runtime isn't slow, although the Java GUI libraries are clearly less efficient than Gtk+. But, then, Gtk+ is also hugely less efficient than Xaw. As machines get faster, we create and use toolkits that are more convenient and less efficient. The Java toolkits have a lot more functionality and are generally easier to program and more robust than Gtk+.
Sen. Judd Gregg also reintroduced legislation to make the value of pi equal to 3. "We cannot afford the inefficiencies resulting from the oddball values of pi some fringe academics have dreamed up. Our new wartime economy must be efficient, and to help with this effort, Congress will adopt legislation that will greatly simplify the design of common military hardware like wheels and gears," said Sen. Judd Gregg in a televised statement.
Give them a break. In today's tech climate, even the big, rich guys are having difficulties with funding.
The company released binaries to a GPL'ed program months before releasing the sources (in fact, they probably have lost all their rights to distribute the kernel because of their GPL violation). There is no documentation, no README, nothing in the source tree, no instructions for building it, no change log, no notes to their own engineers. It is clear that they don't give a damn about people being able to rebuild the software or participating. In fact, I strongly doubt that the sources they ship correspond to the binaries they ship. The huge "core" file is only the last straw.
They gave me some books and told me to learn Perl. Our office was a refurbished factory, with lots of light and open space. Best of all, we could bring our nerf toys in to work (and use them!).
Of course, we have fun doing technical things, not learning Perl or playing with Nerf toys.
have they all suffered from the Economic Darwinism of the early 21st century?
Suffered? I think it's good that dot-coms with almost no technology and almost no business plan have disappeared. Real technology often takes many years to develop; how are sound technology companies supposed to compete for funding with fast talking CEOs for startups?
I downloaded the Linux source from their site. It seems to be some kind of derivative of uClinux. Whether they have made any useful modifications is hard to tell. In any case, they certainly don't seem to be interested in a high quality release or community input: there is no documentation, not even a README. To top it all off, the kernel tarball has a 7.6M core dump from "netscape-commun" in it.
Altogether, I'd stay away. If you want a nice, functional Linux PDA, take a look at the Agenda. HP also will be coming out with a real Linux PDA.
This may mean it won't happen in the way envisioned in this paper. Microsoft will have to wait until someone comes along and figures out how to actually do something new
Let me second that. People have been trying to implement what Microsoft's vision statement outlines for many years. But these systems have always turned into a complex tarpit of interfaces, resource management, and code. Microsoft might be able to throw enough programmers at the problem to get something working, but it will fail because of its complexity--after all, real people will have to program it.
There are some genuinely new ideas needed for how to make this vision happening, and Microsoft doesn't seem to know any more about that than anybody else. I suspect once someone figures it out, it won't take legions of programmers to do it.
If you look at what has been happening in distributed systems and OS research over the last few decades, I think you'll agree that there isn't really innovation in any of Windows, Linux, C#, or Java. But what Linux and Java have going for them is that the implement tried-and-true approaches quite well. Windows, on the other hand, is much more of a mess, and C# isn't really here yet.
That vision of operating systems is about as stale as a copy of MS DOS 3.3. Distributed, fault tolerant, object-oriented, scalable, self-tuning, self-configuring, secure systems have been the goal of operating design for decades. There have been some reasonable attempts at this, but the problem is software engineering and abstraction, not visions or feature lists. I see nothing in Microsoft's paper that
proposes to address these issues.
I think it's unlikely that Microsoft will do better with Millenium than an open source operating system that already exists: Plan9 from Bell Labs. Plan9 already supports location independence, aggressive abstraction, introspection, and all the other stuff that is in Microsoft's vision (Inferno, which the paper cites, is somewhat based on Plan9). The limitations Plan9 has (and it has many) are, I think, intrinsic to this vision, and I doubt traditional operating system designers are equipped to deal with it--otherwise, they would have already done so over the last few decades. And nothing in Microsoft's paper suggests that Microsoft is straying outside this well-grazed field.
Altogether, it looks like Microsoft is going to do what they always do: they are 10-20 years behind the curve, and they are working on another unimaginative, outdated operating system.
Advertising is NOT pointless. Without advertising no one would know about half the products that exist.
Just because some advertising can be informative doesn't mean that all advertising is good. You can inform me about the existence of a fat-laden, unhealthy product without trying to manipulate me into thinking that it is wholesome and will make me young and beautiful. Most commercial advertising today is more of the latter rather than the former, and it uses sophisticated psychology to manipulate its viewers.
You are completely missing the point. The question isn't whether virus infected machines are good or bad, the question is whether ISPs should, on their own, be able to decide what content is good and what content is bad.
You see, if you allow them to do that, sooner or later they'll decide is that the Apache/PHP installation you are running is bad because it could be used to ship around media without digital rights management. Obviously (to them) only Windows XP clients and servers with Microsoft certificates should be allowed to connect to the Internet because only those systems will have the RIAA/MPAA approved digital rights management.
That's a non-sequitur. My point is about whether the ISP should preemptively try to police such things. I think the ISP shouldn't. If you were to receive a virus from my machine, then that should be between your lawyer and my lawyer. The ISP should only get involved if it is ordered to do so by the legal system; it shouldn't start filtering content just because it considers it harmful or undesirable.
If I want to run a machine that's virus infected, that should be my choice. With a dial-up ISP, that's exactly what I'm getting, and the phone company isn't complaining that my auto-dial PPP connection is making too many outgoing phone calls.
When ISPs get into the habit of deciding what content is OK and what content isn't, we are getting into real trouble. And I think they may be exposing themselves to legal liability as well.
1. If you are so anti-Microsoft that you feel the need to create a site against it, isn't it a touch hypocrtical to be using a Microsoft product to do that?
No, not at all. Reality is that a lot of people either don't know how to author web pages otherwise, or that they are forced to use a Microsoft software infrastructure. Windows users are the best ones to criticize Windows, and it seems both legitimate and natural for them to use Windows tools.
Can anyone really blame them if they don't want to have their own tools used against them.
Yes, one can. Microsoft makes software for authoring. That doesn't give them the right to control what we say or do. The fact that they do try to do this is an indication of how dangerous the company is. What's next? You can't say anything disparaging about your phone company on the phone? If Microsoft gets completely in bed with the Republican party, you can't use FrontPage to create sites for the Democratic party?
what if I created an anti-Linux site using the Tux image?
I'm sure there are lots of sites like that. I don't believe Tux is a trademark, but even if it were, and you used it correctly to identify Linux, that would be legit. Just like it is legitimate to use the trademark "Microsoft Windows" to describe an OS that sucks, if you actually are talking about "Microsoft Windows".
I develop the site on a Linux system, hosting it on a Linux server.
Both on RedHat and on Debian, installing software either from source or from binary is trivial. And almost all the software I have ever wanted has been packaged for Linux distributions. Why would I want the BSD ports? Is there any software that I don't know about that I am missing?
They tried before, a phone apparently based on Inferno (AT&T's ill-fated Java killer).
I love VNC, and it is certainly a good way of building light-weight, reliable clients. But I can't quite figure out why I would like this functionality in a phone. I like phones to be unobtrusive, simple, and portable. And for anything more complicated than a phone call, I'd rather have a full screen and a keyboard.
Imagine every appliance you buy coming with pages and pages of copyrights.
Imagine any appliance you buy coming with pages and pages of warnings about not sticking Rover into the microwave and not sticking your fingers into the blender to see whether the blade is turning. Oh, wait, they do.
In short, your objection is ludicrous. You can embed Linux and put your proprietary software on top of it. You do need to include the GPL somewhere--it fits onto a page (small print)--and a pointer to where they can get the sources. If you can't do that, your company is beyond hope anyway.
This is the reason that our systems are based on FreeBSD.
If you ship an embedded system that uses the Linux kernel and some non-kernel application software, it is my understanding that you don't have to ship the sources for the non-kernel application software.
Now, I think less restrictive licenses than the GPL are a good idea in many cases. For example, I think a GPL'ed GUI toolkit is a bad idea because you do want commercial vendors to standardize on the free toolkit and you can't use a GUI toolkit without linking with it. But for the Linux kernel, the GPL rarely if ever restricts commercial use. People even ship proprietary, binary-only drivers for it.
Don't be ridiculous. Even if it were against the license agreement, how would the company detect the tampering? Furthermore, hardware and copyrighted software is sold, not licensed, and that means that the end user probably has the right to do with it whatever he likes, no matter what the company says.
If all you care about is shape, clay is a lot more creative. If you care about function, both Lego and Atollo seem pretty boring to me. Bring back ErectorSet or give FischerTechnik a try--that's a much nicer engineering construction set.
you seriously think that religious memorial services are done not to grieve for the dead but to somehow empower some shadowy religous empire that's going to take over everything
Well, the people who perpertrated the attacks were motivated by religion and they are doubtlessly now being celebrated as martyrs in religious memorials in their own communities. Much of the political passion among Palestinians is motivated by religious memorials. The whole of the Christian church is built around a religious memorial. The history of most of the Christian churches can hardly be particularly reassuring, since they have turned memorials into rallies for their own power from the crusades to support for Nazis. Religious power is at the root of this tragedy, on both sides.
When religion involves mass gatherings, when it is associated with government, or when it involves a large, wealthy hierarchy, it becomes sullied and stops being just about spirituality. Pray, honor, and remember the dead, but do so in private in dialog with God, not in some gaudy public ceremony.
The loss of thousands of lives is tragic. We should quietly honor and remember the dead, and we should take appropriate measures (i.e., bring US airport security up to international standards) to keep this from happening again.
But we do not have to blindly unite behind anything some politician proposes just because he or she assumes the mantle of supposedly honoring the dead. This goes far beyond renewded calls for restrictions on cryptography: carefully choreographed mass religious ceremonies, swarms of grief counsellors and child psychologists, and huge numbers of non-profits are milking this event for all they can. The shame is on Bush, many of our elected representatives, many of our supposed "spiritual leaders", nonprofit organizations, and the media, who are trying to use these horrific events and footage to increase their own power. And where taking advantage of the compassion and vulnerability of others fails, they spread irrational fear about future attacks, trying to use human fear where appealing to human compassion failed.
Don't fall for it. Recognize most of the aftermath of the attack for what is is: a shameless and reprehensible attempt to gain power from human tragedy, executed by people who know instinctively and explicitly how to manipulate human emotions for their own benefit.
Computer screens are generally 2D, without even depth information. When we talk about "3D graphics", what it means is that we get a 2D image that transforms like the image of a 3D object when we interact with it (mouse, trackball, etc.). That is, 3D graphics is simply a particular way of showing and hiding information in response to user input. So, we need to evaluate it relative to other ways of interacting with data on the screen.
I think in practice it has turned out that mechanisms like a folding tree and a tabbed window are more effective and easier to use for interacting with the kinds of data we deal with. Our current 2D interfaces require less user interaction and intervention and display more useful and related information than a system that is constrained by trying to conform to the rules of 3D objects. The closest to 3D we have come in user interfaces is zoomable UIs, but even there the jury is still out whether that is actually useful in practice.
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I don't know what "pre-installed" is supposed to mean. Gnome/Gtk+ are optional packages in almost all distributions.
Java doesn't. I just wonder why that is so.
You might ask why Java isn't part of the RedHat or Debian package systems. There is actually lots of demand, but unfortunately, Sun's licensing policies make this difficult. It's too bad Sun can't market themselves out of a paper bag. However, the Sun JDK is trivial to install. Also, Debian, RedHat, and other systems include several other Java implementations.
Could it be that *gasp* Java is not popular?!
Java, while clearly not perfect, is wildly popular: it is taught widely in colleges, is part of the AP exam, is used extensively in research, and is one of the most popular platforms for building enterprise appliactions. It's a shame that the most vocal Linux proponents seem to be so hostile to it. And it's particularly regrettable that people like de Icaza are off on a wild goose chase with a less mature Java clone called "C#".
The Linux download appears to be larger, but that must be something related to the Linux packaging (worse or no compression perhaps?).
Sen. Judd Gregg also reintroduced legislation to make the value of pi equal to 3. "We cannot afford the inefficiencies resulting from the oddball values of pi some fringe academics have dreamed up. Our new wartime economy must be efficient, and to help with this effort, Congress will adopt legislation that will greatly simplify the design of common military hardware like wheels and gears," said Sen. Judd Gregg in a televised statement.
The company released binaries to a GPL'ed program months before releasing the sources (in fact, they probably have lost all their rights to distribute the kernel because of their GPL violation). There is no documentation, no README, nothing in the source tree, no instructions for building it, no change log, no notes to their own engineers. It is clear that they don't give a damn about people being able to rebuild the software or participating. In fact, I strongly doubt that the sources they ship correspond to the binaries they ship. The huge "core" file is only the last straw.
Of course, we have fun doing technical things, not learning Perl or playing with Nerf toys.
have they all suffered from the Economic Darwinism of the early 21st century?
Suffered? I think it's good that dot-coms with almost no technology and almost no business plan have disappeared. Real technology often takes many years to develop; how are sound technology companies supposed to compete for funding with fast talking CEOs for startups?
Yes, I agree: Linda is a great system for distributed computation. I'm not so sure about JavaSpaces and Jini--more isn't necessarily better.
Altogether, I'd stay away. If you want a nice, functional Linux PDA, take a look at the Agenda. HP also will be coming out with a real Linux PDA.
Let me second that. People have been trying to implement what Microsoft's vision statement outlines for many years. But these systems have always turned into a complex tarpit of interfaces, resource management, and code. Microsoft might be able to throw enough programmers at the problem to get something working, but it will fail because of its complexity--after all, real people will have to program it.
There are some genuinely new ideas needed for how to make this vision happening, and Microsoft doesn't seem to know any more about that than anybody else. I suspect once someone figures it out, it won't take legions of programmers to do it.
If you look at what has been happening in distributed systems and OS research over the last few decades, I think you'll agree that there isn't really innovation in any of Windows, Linux, C#, or Java. But what Linux and Java have going for them is that the implement tried-and-true approaches quite well. Windows, on the other hand, is much more of a mess, and C# isn't really here yet.
I think it's unlikely that Microsoft will do better with Millenium than an open source operating system that already exists: Plan9 from Bell Labs. Plan9 already supports location independence, aggressive abstraction, introspection, and all the other stuff that is in Microsoft's vision (Inferno, which the paper cites, is somewhat based on Plan9). The limitations Plan9 has (and it has many) are, I think, intrinsic to this vision, and I doubt traditional operating system designers are equipped to deal with it--otherwise, they would have already done so over the last few decades. And nothing in Microsoft's paper suggests that Microsoft is straying outside this well-grazed field.
Altogether, it looks like Microsoft is going to do what they always do: they are 10-20 years behind the curve, and they are working on another unimaginative, outdated operating system.
Just because some advertising can be informative doesn't mean that all advertising is good. You can inform me about the existence of a fat-laden, unhealthy product without trying to manipulate me into thinking that it is wholesome and will make me young and beautiful. Most commercial advertising today is more of the latter rather than the former, and it uses sophisticated psychology to manipulate its viewers.
You see, if you allow them to do that, sooner or later they'll decide is that the Apache/PHP installation you are running is bad because it could be used to ship around media without digital rights management. Obviously (to them) only Windows XP clients and servers with Microsoft certificates should be allowed to connect to the Internet because only those systems will have the RIAA/MPAA approved digital rights management.
That's a non-sequitur. My point is about whether the ISP should preemptively try to police such things. I think the ISP shouldn't. If you were to receive a virus from my machine, then that should be between your lawyer and my lawyer. The ISP should only get involved if it is ordered to do so by the legal system; it shouldn't start filtering content just because it considers it harmful or undesirable.
When ISPs get into the habit of deciding what content is OK and what content isn't, we are getting into real trouble. And I think they may be exposing themselves to legal liability as well.
No, not at all. Reality is that a lot of people either don't know how to author web pages otherwise, or that they are forced to use a Microsoft software infrastructure. Windows users are the best ones to criticize Windows, and it seems both legitimate and natural for them to use Windows tools.
Can anyone really blame them if they don't want to have their own tools used against them.
Yes, one can. Microsoft makes software for authoring. That doesn't give them the right to control what we say or do. The fact that they do try to do this is an indication of how dangerous the company is. What's next? You can't say anything disparaging about your phone company on the phone? If Microsoft gets completely in bed with the Republican party, you can't use FrontPage to create sites for the Democratic party?
what if I created an anti-Linux site using the Tux image?
I'm sure there are lots of sites like that. I don't believe Tux is a trademark, but even if it were, and you used it correctly to identify Linux, that would be legit. Just like it is legitimate to use the trademark "Microsoft Windows" to describe an OS that sucks, if you actually are talking about "Microsoft Windows".
I develop the site on a Linux system, hosting it on a Linux server.
I think that would be great. Please go ahead.
Both on RedHat and on Debian, installing software either from source or from binary is trivial. And almost all the software I have ever wanted has been packaged for Linux distributions. Why would I want the BSD ports? Is there any software that I don't know about that I am missing?
I love VNC, and it is certainly a good way of building light-weight, reliable clients. But I can't quite figure out why I would like this functionality in a phone. I like phones to be unobtrusive, simple, and portable. And for anything more complicated than a phone call, I'd rather have a full screen and a keyboard.
Imagine any appliance you buy coming with pages and pages of warnings about not sticking Rover into the microwave and not sticking your fingers into the blender to see whether the blade is turning. Oh, wait, they do.
In short, your objection is ludicrous. You can embed Linux and put your proprietary software on top of it. You do need to include the GPL somewhere--it fits onto a page (small print)--and a pointer to where they can get the sources. If you can't do that, your company is beyond hope anyway.
If you ship an embedded system that uses the Linux kernel and some non-kernel application software, it is my understanding that you don't have to ship the sources for the non-kernel application software.
Now, I think less restrictive licenses than the GPL are a good idea in many cases. For example, I think a GPL'ed GUI toolkit is a bad idea because you do want commercial vendors to standardize on the free toolkit and you can't use a GUI toolkit without linking with it. But for the Linux kernel, the GPL rarely if ever restricts commercial use. People even ship proprietary, binary-only drivers for it.
Don't be ridiculous. Even if it were against the license agreement, how would the company detect the tampering? Furthermore, hardware and copyrighted software is sold, not licensed, and that means that the end user probably has the right to do with it whatever he likes, no matter what the company says.
If all you care about is shape, clay is a lot more creative. If you care about function, both Lego and Atollo seem pretty boring to me. Bring back ErectorSet or give FischerTechnik a try--that's a much nicer engineering construction set.
Well, the people who perpertrated the attacks were motivated by religion and they are doubtlessly now being celebrated as martyrs in religious memorials in their own communities. Much of the political passion among Palestinians is motivated by religious memorials. The whole of the Christian church is built around a religious memorial. The history of most of the Christian churches can hardly be particularly reassuring, since they have turned memorials into rallies for their own power from the crusades to support for Nazis. Religious power is at the root of this tragedy, on both sides.
When religion involves mass gatherings, when it is associated with government, or when it involves a large, wealthy hierarchy, it becomes sullied and stops being just about spirituality. Pray, honor, and remember the dead, but do so in private in dialog with God, not in some gaudy public ceremony.
But we do not have to blindly unite behind anything some politician proposes just because he or she assumes the mantle of supposedly honoring the dead. This goes far beyond renewded calls for restrictions on cryptography: carefully choreographed mass religious ceremonies, swarms of grief counsellors and child psychologists, and huge numbers of non-profits are milking this event for all they can. The shame is on Bush, many of our elected representatives, many of our supposed "spiritual leaders", nonprofit organizations, and the media, who are trying to use these horrific events and footage to increase their own power. And where taking advantage of the compassion and vulnerability of others fails, they spread irrational fear about future attacks, trying to use human fear where appealing to human compassion failed.
Don't fall for it. Recognize most of the aftermath of the attack for what is is: a shameless and reprehensible attempt to gain power from human tragedy, executed by people who know instinctively and explicitly how to manipulate human emotions for their own benefit.
I think in practice it has turned out that mechanisms like a folding tree and a tabbed window are more effective and easier to use for interacting with the kinds of data we deal with. Our current 2D interfaces require less user interaction and intervention and display more useful and related information than a system that is constrained by trying to conform to the rules of 3D objects. The closest to 3D we have come in user interfaces is zoomable UIs, but even there the jury is still out whether that is actually useful in practice.