Pretty sure this was available in Win2k as well...
Not by default, I don't think - certainly the 2K box I have to hand doesn't have anything obvious installed - but there might have been a downloadable IPv6 stack from Microsoft Research.
Seriously, this is getting rediculous, you're changing arguments more frequently than most/. readers change their underware.
Am I? I haven't changed my view anywhere here - I didn't write exhaustively in the first place and I've expanded on my opinion when you've taken the discussion in a different direction.
Ehm, yes, that's why all those great closed source apps form MS, that so constantly innovated are so successful...
Fair point, perhaps my imaginary 'free market' is too simple. FWIW I still think Office 2003 beats OO.o for features and usability, and Visual Studio is pretty much the best IDE I've seen - MS can make good stuff.
There's lot of incentive, competition you claim to be the incentive for closed source programs is one of them.
Competition with closed-source? No, for the home desktop or small-business market open source doesn't have to go toe-to-toe on features because it'll always win on price point.
And your claim that they aren't is simply baseless.
Well, uh, no more baseless than you just naming a few programs to say they are. It's already clear we disagree on that.
BitKeeper is a clear counter example of what you are saying, the original ideas comes from several products like CVS you know.
OK, I don't really know much about BitKeeper except I've heard the merge tools are better than anyone elses. Isn't that some innovation?
The CVS comparison is bogus: BitKeeper is a distributed version control system whereas CVS isn't and that's a different problem.
Closed source have nothing to do with the fact that a "clone" is available on Linux. Popularity is the only reason, because if a lot of Linux users want a popular functionality, they will implement it, be it closed or open.
And that's almost my original point: the successful open source projects are the ones that are popular. They don't need to be innovative to be popular. The need to serve people's needs to be popular. On the other hand, closed source software needs to serve people's needs to make money and survive. It's therefore not surprising that all the big open-source projects have closed-source counterparts.
Surely Gnome, KDE, Gnumeric are more than clones, they innovate.
Do they? What does Gnumeric offer over Excel? What do Gnome or KDE offer over OS X?
I'm sure there is plenty of innovation in open source, it's just not at the forefront. And, in the open-source world, if it's not at the forefront then it might not get critical developer mass to reach it's full potential. That's my original point.
1. The projects I mentioned (and other projects) show that hobbiest do follow through, thus contradicting his original claim.
In some cases, yes. The popular closed-source programs are the ones that people need most. That's driven by the market. The popular open-source programs, the ones that get critical mass to go the full development cycle, are also the ones that people need most. That's driven by programmer interest and necessity. The closed-source programs have to compete for market share: they must innovate or die. The popular open-source programs don't have to innovate, they just need to work. There's no incentive for them to be innovative and in general they aren't.
The poster I originally replied to quoted "building new software". OK, I interpreted that as "innovative software" which I think was reasonable given that's what TFA is about:-p He said that all you need is programmer time to get innovation. I argued that you're not going to see innovation just given programmer time. I never meant that as a hard-and-fast rule, just the general trend. Most of the true open source innovation is going to be lost amongst all the non-innovative software: after all, you said yourself anyone and their mother can start an open-source project.
Hopefully that's coherent enough for you:-p whether you agree with it or not.
So, again, not open source, but the projects being hobby projects leads to incomlete projects. However, the great thing about open source is that everyone who feels like it can pick up those projects and work on them, even if the original developer isn't interested anymore.
Sure. I've had a few similar replies so maybe I needed to quote more of the guy I was replying to. Roughly:
Larry: Money drives software innovation GGP: Hobbyist time works just as well Me: Hobbyist time will only get you so far
As another AC pointed out, yes, the innovation often will happen in the hobbyist bit. But you're not going to get complete, visible innovative software unless you go full cycle. Sure, someone else can pick it up an run with it but it's hard to get those people to notice your project unless you've got it so far.
Yes, there are plenty of OSS projects that do go full cycle but they're often the popular-closed-source clones that Larry's complaining about. The ones you cite all are, arguably.
Certainly not desktop environments, servers, remote shells, anonymizing (or swarming) networks, or compilers.
AFAICR, ssh did innovate the secure connection. I'd give them kudos for that.
Re:That's just silly. And here's why.
on
McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe you hadn't noticed, but a LOT of the products you're describing -- eg., the browser -- existed in the OSS sphere before it did in the closed-source sphere.
The basic idea, perhaps, but not necessarily the design.
Version control with all the bells and whistles is a complex problem. Coming up with a good solution is difficult. Larry doesn't care that there are open source version control systems, he cares that other people are copying his solution.
...or time. Keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there that have the free time on their hands to tinker with things that they find interesting.
Remember that getting the prototype up and running is the interesting bit - getting it polished, fully QAed and packaged is the dull slog that no-one really wants to do. Witness all the incomplete projects on sourceforge. Once it's got just enough function to scratch the author's itch they move on to other things.
There's a wide gulf in what people will do because they want to and what they'll do because they're paid to - or at least in how many people you'll get at each end of the spectrum.
Big lie. The simple fact that they didn't even consider making it optional is because with the current IE codebase, it's just plain impossible. Everyone knows how M$ can't create modular softwares.
Twaddle. The IE rendering engine is modular, which is why everything uses it, which is why everyone complains "it's a part of the OS". Visual Studio.NET, for example, has tabs that can contain IE controls - you can use it in effect as a tabbed browser. Ditto recent versions of HTML help.
That's quite true. The most often reply, when GCC people are asked for help on writing front-ends, is to a) analyse the source code, b) try yacc-lex, c) break your head in the wall.
There's a toy language, treelang, to play with - you can see what's needed from that. Essentially that was intended as 'code documentation' for a basic front-end.
It seems that GCC people are afraid that someone might right a better programming language, taking advantage of their great efforts towards optimization.
There's no great conspiracy theory - simply no-one's stepped up and written formal docs or tutorials. As usual, if you want something that no-one else wants you'll have to pay someone to do it or do it yourself.
Guess I could have checked for myself before posting. I just assumed there would be a MSDN release. So how the hell are we supposed to test for this target?
Well, it's a fair assumption - I expect they will get around to it. After all, they've got Server 2003 Webserver edition up which I don't think has any value except that it's a crippled 2003, and this *shouldn't* be any different to a crippled XP. So I'd just test for XP. But they aren't that fast at getting stuff up on MSDN downloads either.
Alternatively, perhaps they're not interested in third-party programs for it? Maybe they just expect people to run Outlook Express, IE and maybe Works and nothing else?
No, a British one. They're a really cool bunch of guys so I'm not going to say anything bad about them and name them - they just didn't get this one detail right when we first started using them and they do now.
But if the swap partition and system partition are on the same logical disk you still run the chance of accidently overwriting the wrong partition space.
Huh? Sorry, I don't get what you're saying.
Windows doesn't support dedicated swap partitions - you allocate space swap space on regular drives. The memory dump is only supported for swap space on the boot partition, so for this to work they *must* be on the same logical disk. It knows how to write to swap independently of the filesystem, and it knows how big the swap space is, so it's not going to overwrite anything.
I tried installing XP 64-bit, and it refused to detect my hard drive...
More likely your hard drive *controller*.
Go to your motherboard manufacturer's site or the controller manufacturer's site and see if you can download Win64 drivers for it. You can get drivers for most SATA RAID controllers nowadays (Promise's, VIA's, etc.) You will need a floppy disk or USB storage thing to load it, though. When the windows installer's starting up you press F6 to load more storage drivers.
I have no idea what to do with the stupid windows error message unless the OS your app crashed has a debuger on it.
Pre-XP, Windows has a utility Dr.Watson which'll install itself as a debugger and produce useful dumps. XP automatically produces a dump and asks permission to send it to Microsoft; it might then direct you to a web page describing the problem.
Surely businesses wouldn't want to use this OS or even XP Home for that matter. The network capabilities of XP Home surely wouldn't be suitable for business and I would imagine the networking tools are even more crippled in Starter Edition.
Why not? What if all your business apps are web-based and you only need thin clients? Starter will definitely have IE.
XP Home's network is only crippled in that it can't join a domain. If you're using thin clients and you can do without implicit NTLM authentication then that's no big deal.
Of course when the machine is in such a mess that it decides to blue-screen you're probably not going to trust it to write a file.
Yes but it *can* safely write to swap space. On the next boot (I think!) it'll pull the crash dump out of swap and saves it in your windows folder for analysis. System Properties, Advanced, Startup and Recovery, Write debugging information. On XP and 2003 it'll then look at the crash and either point you to a web page with help on the STOP error or, if it doesn't recognise the crash, it'll ask permission to upload the memory dump to Microsoft.
This does mean you need at least as much swap space on the system drive as you have memory for a full dump - which can be a problem if you've deliberately taken a small system partition, as our co-lo host used to do by default.
I never understood parentheses within quotes. Did he whisper that part, or are we talking about an interview on an IRC channel?
It's meant as an aside - he's explaining that ECC is supposed to be harder to crack. This is an artefact of trying to write English as dictation: if you spoke that, you could highlight the aside without disengaging your audience by breaking the rhythm of speech and changing both your tone of voice and volume. The written word can't do any of those. You can try and simulate it with brackets - or hyphanated sections - but it usually doesn't work. English-as-spoken doesn't automatically make good written English.
All four of the sentences you quote actually are quite readable English. Two of them are perfectly grammatical. I'll make minor modifications in asterisks and bold to show you what I mean.
I disagree: the two you corrected aren't very readable without the modifications. Worse, they're confused on the technical details so a technically-informed reader will stumble: this still doesn't make sense:
because they cannot crack *an* RSA/DSA*-*based one?
unless "RSA/DSA" is a compound crypto scheme - which it isn't. Better: "because they cannot crack RSA- or DSA-based schemes".
Similar complaints with the second one. Additionally the "just" spoils the inferred rhythm as-read (and so the readability), and "USbusiness" should clearly be "U.S. businesses".
Third: he's talking about putting all your eggs in one basket cryptographically. That isn't "monopoly". Again there's readability problems with "having just a couple of" and writing "based" as an intransitive. I really don't think "if cracked" is well-formed either: I'd expect you'd need an explicit subject for "cracked".
But the fourth one? That can't possibly be right!
Why is often used a money-rewarded challenge to verify a crypto algorithm?"
"often used" here *isn't* an adverb phrase. It's not hyphenated for a start:-p. But let's pretend it is an adverb phrase: eliminate it and we've got "why is <noun> <infinitive>". That doesn't parse.
Bonjour hooks into the TCP/IP stack -- how else do you think "ping your-stupid-macs-name.local" returns something worthwhile?
Does all name resolution go through TCP/IP? I'd be surprised. Can't you use WINS over Netbios, or is that just versions past?
In any case, I stand by what I said:
Even if they're hooking something deep into the IP stack they could easily restart all networking on the machine.
Think about when you're upgrading network drivers on Windows: it just stops the driver, replaces it and restarts it. No reboot required. You haven't needed to reboot for that sort of thing since Windows 2000.
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Pretty sure this was available in Win2k as well...
Not by default, I don't think - certainly the 2K box I have to hand doesn't have anything obvious installed - but there might have been a downloadable IPv6 stack from Microsoft Research.
Seriously, this is getting rediculous, you're changing arguments more frequently than most /. readers change their underware.
Am I? I haven't changed my view anywhere here - I didn't write exhaustively in the first place and I've expanded on my opinion when you've taken the discussion in a different direction.
Ehm, yes, that's why all those great closed source apps form MS, that so constantly innovated are so successful...
Fair point, perhaps my imaginary 'free market' is too simple. FWIW I still think Office 2003 beats OO.o for features and usability, and Visual Studio is pretty much the best IDE I've seen - MS can make good stuff.
There's lot of incentive, competition you claim to be the incentive for closed source programs is one of them.
Competition with closed-source? No, for the home desktop or small-business market open source doesn't have to go toe-to-toe on features because it'll always win on price point.
And your claim that they aren't is simply baseless.
Well, uh, no more baseless than you just naming a few programs to say they are. It's already clear we disagree on that.
certain key advertising accounts *cough*MS*cough* aren't looking to be IPv6 compliant any time soon.
But Windows 2003 Server does have an IPv6 stack and this site says XP does too: just type "ipv6 install" in the console.
BitKeeper is a clear counter example of what you are saying, the original ideas comes from several products like CVS you know.
OK, I don't really know much about BitKeeper except I've heard the merge tools are better than anyone elses. Isn't that some innovation?
The CVS comparison is bogus: BitKeeper is a distributed version control system whereas CVS isn't and that's a different problem.
Closed source have nothing to do with the fact that a "clone" is available on Linux. Popularity is the only reason, because if a lot of Linux users want a popular functionality, they will implement it, be it closed or open.
And that's almost my original point: the successful open source projects are the ones that are popular. They don't need to be innovative to be popular. The need to serve people's needs to be popular. On the other hand, closed source software needs to serve people's needs to make money and survive. It's therefore not surprising that all the big open-source projects have closed-source counterparts.
Surely Gnome, KDE, Gnumeric are more than clones, they innovate.
Do they? What does Gnumeric offer over Excel? What do Gnome or KDE offer over OS X?
I'm sure there is plenty of innovation in open source, it's just not at the forefront. And, in the open-source world, if it's not at the forefront then it might not get critical developer mass to reach it's full potential. That's my original point.
1. The projects I mentioned (and other projects) show that hobbiest do follow through, thus contradicting his original claim.
:-p He said that all you need is programmer time to get innovation. I argued that you're not going to see innovation just given programmer time. I never meant that as a hard-and-fast rule, just the general trend. Most of the true open source innovation is going to be lost amongst all the non-innovative software: after all, you said yourself anyone and their mother can start an open-source project.
:-p whether you agree with it or not.
In some cases, yes. The popular closed-source programs are the ones that people need most. That's driven by the market. The popular open-source programs, the ones that get critical mass to go the full development cycle, are also the ones that people need most. That's driven by programmer interest and necessity. The closed-source programs have to compete for market share: they must innovate or die. The popular open-source programs don't have to innovate, they just need to work. There's no incentive for them to be innovative and in general they aren't.
The poster I originally replied to quoted "building new software". OK, I interpreted that as "innovative software" which I think was reasonable given that's what TFA is about
Hopefully that's coherent enough for you
Sure, but the polish rarely contains any innovation - the innovative parts are almost always in the part that scratches the programmers itch.
Absolutely. But it's hard to get people sit up and notice your itch-scratching project until you've taken it further than that.
So, again, not open source, but the projects being hobby projects leads to incomlete projects. However, the great thing about open source is that everyone who feels like it can pick up those projects and work on them, even if the original developer isn't interested anymore.
Sure. I've had a few similar replies so maybe I needed to quote more of the guy I was replying to. Roughly:
Larry: Money drives software innovation
GGP: Hobbyist time works just as well
Me: Hobbyist time will only get you so far
As another AC pointed out, yes, the innovation often will happen in the hobbyist bit. But you're not going to get complete, visible innovative software unless you go full cycle. Sure, someone else can pick it up an run with it but it's hard to get those people to notice your project unless you've got it so far.
Yes, there are plenty of OSS projects that do go full cycle but they're often the popular-closed-source clones that Larry's complaining about. The ones you cite all are, arguably.
Certainly not desktop environments, servers, remote shells, anonymizing (or swarming) networks, or compilers.
AFAICR, ssh did innovate the secure connection. I'd give them kudos for that.
Maybe you hadn't noticed, but a LOT of the products you're describing -- eg., the browser -- existed in the OSS sphere before it did in the closed-source sphere.
The basic idea, perhaps, but not necessarily the design.
Version control with all the bells and whistles is a complex problem. Coming up with a good solution is difficult. Larry doesn't care that there are open source version control systems, he cares that other people are copying his solution.
...or time. Keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there that have the free time on their hands to tinker with things that they find interesting.
Remember that getting the prototype up and running is the interesting bit - getting it polished, fully QAed and packaged is the dull slog that no-one really wants to do. Witness all the incomplete projects on sourceforge. Once it's got just enough function to scratch the author's itch they move on to other things.
There's a wide gulf in what people will do because they want to and what they'll do because they're paid to - or at least in how many people you'll get at each end of the spectrum.
It's an AP story. See also Sci-Tech today for the same story.
Big lie. The simple fact that they didn't even consider making it optional is because with the current IE codebase, it's just plain impossible. Everyone knows how M$ can't create modular softwares.
Twaddle. The IE rendering engine is modular, which is why everything uses it, which is why everyone complains "it's a part of the OS". Visual Studio.NET, for example, has tabs that can contain IE controls - you can use it in effect as a tabbed browser. Ditto recent versions of HTML help.
That's quite true. The most often reply, when GCC people are asked for help on writing front-ends, is to a) analyse the source code, b) try yacc-lex, c) break your head in the wall.
There's a toy language, treelang, to play with - you can see what's needed from that. Essentially that was intended as 'code documentation' for a basic front-end.
It seems that GCC people are afraid that someone might right a better programming language, taking advantage of their great efforts towards optimization.
There's no great conspiracy theory - simply no-one's stepped up and written formal docs or tutorials. As usual, if you want something that no-one else wants you'll have to pay someone to do it or do it yourself.
Guess I could have checked for myself before posting. I just assumed there would be a MSDN release. So how the hell are we supposed to test for this target?
Well, it's a fair assumption - I expect they will get around to it. After all, they've got Server 2003 Webserver edition up which I don't think has any value except that it's a crippled 2003, and this *shouldn't* be any different to a crippled XP. So I'd just test for XP. But they aren't that fast at getting stuff up on MSDN downloads either.
Alternatively, perhaps they're not interested in third-party programs for it? Maybe they just expect people to run Outlook Express, IE and maybe Works and nothing else?
Interland, i assume ...
No, a British one. They're a really cool bunch of guys so I'm not going to say anything bad about them and name them - they just didn't get this one detail right when we first started using them and they do now.
But if the swap partition and system partition are on the same logical disk you still run the chance of accidently overwriting the wrong partition space.
Huh? Sorry, I don't get what you're saying.
Windows doesn't support dedicated swap partitions - you allocate space swap space on regular drives. The memory dump is only supported for swap space on the boot partition, so for this to work they *must* be on the same logical disk. It knows how to write to swap independently of the filesystem, and it knows how big the swap space is, so it's not going to overwrite anything.
I tried installing XP 64-bit, and it refused to detect my hard drive...
More likely your hard drive *controller*.
Go to your motherboard manufacturer's site or the controller manufacturer's site and see if you can download Win64 drivers for it. You can get drivers for most SATA RAID controllers nowadays (Promise's, VIA's, etc.) You will need a floppy disk or USB storage thing to load it, though. When the windows installer's starting up you press F6 to load more storage drivers.
I have no idea what to do with the stupid windows error message unless the OS your app crashed has a debuger on it.
Pre-XP, Windows has a utility Dr.Watson which'll install itself as a debugger and produce useful dumps. XP automatically produces a dump and asks permission to send it to Microsoft; it might then direct you to a web page describing the problem.
I didn't see any posts about how the MSDN version behaves
MSDN version? I don't see it on subscriber downloads and I've grepped the table-of-contents HTML.
If they did do one, I'd guess:
- it'd clearly say "Developer", "not for end user use" all over it, and probably be time-limited
- it'd run on anything
Surely businesses wouldn't want to use this OS or even XP Home for that matter. The network capabilities of XP Home surely wouldn't be suitable for business and I would imagine the networking tools are even more crippled in Starter Edition.
Why not? What if all your business apps are web-based and you only need thin clients? Starter will definitely have IE.
XP Home's network is only crippled in that it can't join a domain. If you're using thin clients and you can do without implicit NTLM authentication then that's no big deal.
Of course when the machine is in such a mess that it decides to blue-screen you're probably not going to trust it to write a file.
Yes but it *can* safely write to swap space. On the next boot (I think!) it'll pull the crash dump out of swap and saves it in your windows folder for analysis. System Properties, Advanced, Startup and Recovery, Write debugging information. On XP and 2003 it'll then look at the crash and either point you to a web page with help on the STOP error or, if it doesn't recognise the crash, it'll ask permission to upload the memory dump to Microsoft.
This does mean you need at least as much swap space on the system drive as you have memory for a full dump - which can be a problem if you've deliberately taken a small system partition, as our co-lo host used to do by default.
You can understand it as: "Why is a money-rewarded challenge often used to verify a crypto algorithm?"
Thanks. I've no trouble understanding it - I'm arguing with the other AC that it's not perfectly-formed English.
I'm french, this may explain why I can parse it.
Ah yes - I haven't studied French for years but I remember that construction now you've pointed it out! Thanks.
I never understood parentheses within quotes. Did he whisper that part, or are we talking about an interview on an IRC channel?
It's meant as an aside - he's explaining that ECC is supposed to be harder to crack. This is an artefact of trying to write English as dictation: if you spoke that, you could highlight the aside without disengaging your audience by breaking the rhythm of speech and changing both your tone of voice and volume. The written word can't do any of those. You can try and simulate it with brackets - or hyphanated sections - but it usually doesn't work. English-as-spoken doesn't automatically make good written English.
I disagree: the two you corrected aren't very readable without the modifications. Worse, they're confused on the technical details so a technically-informed reader will stumble: this still doesn't make sense:unless "RSA/DSA" is a compound crypto scheme - which it isn't. Better: "because they cannot crack RSA- or DSA-based schemes".
Similar complaints with the second one. Additionally the "just" spoils the inferred rhythm as-read (and so the readability), and "USbusiness" should clearly be "U.S. businesses".
Third: he's talking about putting all your eggs in one basket cryptographically. That isn't "monopoly". Again there's readability problems with "having just a couple of" and writing "based" as an intransitive. I really don't think "if cracked" is well-formed either: I'd expect you'd need an explicit subject for "cracked".
But the fourth one? That can't possibly be right!"often used" here *isn't* an adverb phrase. It's not hyphenated for a start
Does all name resolution go through TCP/IP? I'd be surprised. Can't you use WINS over Netbios, or is that just versions past?
In any case, I stand by what I said:Think about when you're upgrading network drivers on Windows: it just stops the driver, replaces it and restarts it. No reboot required. You haven't needed to reboot for that sort of thing since Windows 2000.