Have any of you considered the idea that perhaps Lockheed is big enough to develop the 'business apps' they need in-house, and simply have to port that from Solaris to Linux. I'm thinking that they probably can buy CAD, but their simulators, project management software, and other stuff is all done in-house.
Have you considered that Lockheed probably does not want to get into the 'business apps' business? Why either devote a fair section of your work force or hire a bunch of new folks to write something that already exists and works? *poof* there goes a big shot of profits for the year(s) spent in development... *thwoop* there goes your TCO up through the chimney and out onto the roof. Contrary to popular/. belief, it will take a company significant money to develop all these kinds of things in house, which makes *no* sense whatsoever since they already have something that works and what they'd have to develop is completely out of their market (airplanes, missiles, missile systems, etc.)
I'm sure "business app provider" is not one of the bullets that Lockheed wants to add to their marketing pamphlets.
This article would have been good except for the massive overuse of the word "hacker".... to the point where I was beginning to wonder whether or not the author really knew what the word means or not.
Take that, throw in a bit of bias and religion and you have what he wrote.
I think it would have been much better if he had left out all the "hacker" noise and left out the OS religion and kept focused on providing a good workplace and what good programmers want.
Other than that, the article was a less technical and detailed version of another article that came out a while back (and was posted on/.) talking about commonalities among programmers (such as signs of minor autism and such).
After thinking about it more and writing this, my opinion of this post has dropped a bit to the point of just being a poor rehash of previous work.
There are a number of low latency, high performance interconnects out there. The problem is that they are *still* expensive because they don't reach economies of scale that the commodity stuff (Ethernet) does, and won't reach those scales for some time. Not everyone is going to run out and buy Myrinet cards and switches for their home machines so the prices for those are going to be high... maybe not as high as a Cray T3E connecting the same number of processors, but still pretty high. And then... you are limited by the speed of the PCI bus (and PCI-X and PCI-E etc.) What we eventually need is something that is as fast as the processor with near the same latency to memory as the processor for some problems and guess what that turns into.... a form of NUMA (yeah, I read your NUMA comments below:)
BTW the one thing I think would be a worse idea than promoting vector computers is promoting NUMA BTW:) NUMA scales poorly, you have to throw a lot of hardware at it... it is a good architecture for lazy programmers.
Well, NUMA allows folks to use the single system image and shared memory programming paradigms. Some problems map to those pretty well.
Real parallel programming is still done with MPI and its descendants.
Thanks:) I was involved with MPI in several ways some years back.
...and that is one of the problems... The benchmark used to make the Top500 list is an extremely simple one that doesn't reflect some of the harder problems to solve (it actually reflects a rather easy one to solve and one that is very latency tollerant). Those harder problems to solve tend to require at least as performant interconnect as the CPUs themselves.
Ethernet is a very high latency interconnect and is poorly suited to many types of fine grained parallelism. If Ethernet was the end-all, be-all of high performance computing, why did AMD use HyperTransport to interconnect Opterons instead of Ethernet? (or any other high speed NUMA switched network to interconnect processors by any other vendor)
Yes... but it depends on the overhead required for those almost-independent pieces to be transferred from one machine to another. There are lots of fine grained problems out there where All the computers in the world tied together with Ethernet couldn't solve as fast as one good supercomputer.
Basically it boils down to:
Compute the cost for communication of one work unit for your algorithm. Compute the cost for processing that work unit.
If the cost for communication is significant compared to the computaional cost (say, 1%) then you probably will have a performance issue.
This is why SETI and the like do well. The cost of communication of one WU is insignificant/irrelevant compared to the computational cost of one WU.
However, there are a good number of problems that can't (or at least haven't yet) had algorithms thought out where the cost of the communication of one WU over a high latency interconnect like Ethernet is useful given the amount of computation of that one WU. I assure you, if it were easy to make those problems embarassingly parallel like SETI, someone would have done it already and if you can figure even some of them out, you'd be very wealthy. If you could figure out a way to do it all automatically and do it well, you'd be rich beyond the dreams of avarice!
Clusters (talking about "Beowulf" types and such using stuff like Ethernet, no matter the speed) do OK at coarse grained problems. That is, problems where communication is seldom and typically when it happens, is a chunk of data like a WU or something where the consuming node can go off and compute on it a while then submit some result or intermediate result. All of the "Distributed" projects like SETI are of this type and are even a subclass of coarse grained problems called Embarassingly Parallel.
Fine grained problems typically require much more inter-node communication and are also typically much more sensitive to latency. Fine grained problems typically show lots of communication and (not always, but typically) smaller amounts of data transferred. For example, take a problem where each node will sum up an array of 16 integers passed to it and pass this (partial) sum back to the sender for it to use in its calculations. On 100Mb Ethernet, the latency of the transfer of that 16 bytes is *huge* compared to the full transfer time (overhead of packet size and slowness of the actual transfer) and the computational time for adding 16 integers together. A "Beowulf" cluster would be ill suited to this type of problem simply because Ethernet at those scales is extremely inefficient. However, there are architectures (some SuperComputers) that could do this algorithm quite well.
Another example of this is to think about a kernel (maybe a Linux one) that is multiprocessor. How well would a shared image Linux kernel perform if it were using Ethernet as its interconnect between nodes as opposed to shared memory on a dual/multi CPU motherboard? This is one reason why SGI, Cray, Sun, IBM, and others have developed NUMA architectures - basically the bus between processors is really a switched network that is extremely high bandwidth (GB/s) and extremely low latency (measured in microseconds at worst) in order to run single system images - in order to scale the number of CPUs up in a box that can work on the same problem in parallel.
So, parallel programs are written with a mind to the algorithms being used to solve the problem and the hardware on which it will run. For example, there are a number of algorithms for solving systems of equations in parallel. Different algorithms may be more latency critical than others (some may not be penalized by high latency networks such as Ethernet as others which require more communications). Not all problems have multiple "good" algorithmic solutions where the programmer can pick based on the hardware available. Some problems do not have "good" algorithmic solutions that are latency tollerant at all. Those algorithms/problems need low latency networks to solve and typically, the only solutions are super computers and very "special"/exotic networks (read: expensive) are the ones that supply very low latency interconnects - Myrinet, Giganet, RACE, etc.
I propose a new measure of chip perfomance Specfp_base_2000/Watt thermal load.
The embedded world (embedded as in Mercury, CSPI, Sky, etc.) has been using FLOPS/Watt (FLOPS per Watt) and FLOPS/m^^3 (FLOPS per cubic meter) for a long time as they have always had to compromise heat vs. computational performance vs. volume.
> How could you prove I set out > to intentionally make that error?
The problem is that a typical open source project maintainer will not be concerned with _why_ a patch contains buggy code. Instead, he'll run the current suite of tests, they'll fail, and he'll reject the patch....and we all know how exhaustive most suites of tests are...
It's easy to retort GreenHills FUD by saying all changes will be baselined and a change control board will review any updates (easy enough huh).
Yes... but how will this save the government money? A *competant* control board that has to review every line of code for potential threats has to be knowledgable on the code. This means that they have to have about as many programmers looking at the code as there are people writing the code and with nearly the same knowledge. If that's the case, why don't they just hire the folks to write the code in the first place so that the control board/programming team is even more intimate with the code?
Having a competant control board is not so much different than just hiring the programmers in the first place.
Aside from that, there are plenty of reasons why the government should not open source many of their codes as it may give opposing groups of people a leg up in their technology.
This is at least as safe as closed source - probably moreso due to the fact that many people would be able to go through the code.
The fact that someone *can* go through the code has absolutely no bearing on whether the code is safe or not. The action of someone going through the code may or may not mean the code is safe or not. I *can* go outside and chop that tree that I see out my window down. Unless I actually *do* that action, the tree still stands. Having the ability to do something in no way implies that it will get done.
I have two of the SN41G2s at home that I got about a year and a half ago. One has an Athlon XP 2600+/333 w/ ATI 9800 Pro and the other an Athlon XP 2400+/266 w/ ATI 9600 XT. Both have 1G memory. My fiancee and I use these as our main machines and we carry them every so often over to friends' house for our mini-LAN games (mini being that there are usually only around 6 of us there). They are much easier to transport than any one of our other four tower/mini-tower case machines. Both of the machines run very well and are very performant given their hardware. I'm glad we got these (and so are our backs).
Yeah, but if you took 9 days to write all the CDs, you'd still be at 10 Gbps (9 days of writing, 1 day of flying), which is still pretty high. If you took 99 days to write all the DVDs, you'd be down to 1 Gbps, which is *still* faster than you will transfer anything from LA to Sydney over the normal Internet, even though it took 100 days (1/3 of a year) to arrive =)
and your jumbo comment is flawed in that all transfer rates are given in bits pr second. for a jumbo that would be more like terrabits pr day and would in calculation get a very low bandwidth in b/s terms.
bits per second is an average transfer over time. That 747 full of DVDs has a huge bps transfer rate.
and a 747 can easily carry more than 1TB of data worth of DVDs (1TB of DVD is only ~100 DVDs, which will fit in a breadbox easily - I'd imagine a 747 could carry more on the order of a few PB at a time - which would mean a trasfer rate of over 1000 times the number above, which is faster than any generally available wide area network today - ~ 100 Gbps). However, the latency is high(1 day before the first bit arrives at the destination).
There were times (such as when the Pentium was being taped out) when companies shipped entire HDD rack cabinets to the destination because it was much faster (bandwidth) than transfering it over the network.
The age old saying is: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon hurtling down the interstate.
That being said, there are tasks that are latency sensitive, as your talking on the phone example shows.
IBM has made it clear, in my mind at least, that where they embrace free source software, they do so because they don't have to maintain it
Completely incorrect. Who do you think wrote the initial support for their special hardware needs? Who do you think is going to be called for a fix when some customer who bought support has kernel panics and the like? IBM has a rather large team of Linux maintainers.
that it levels the playing field and makes their fancy service the important part, that customers are not locked into them and they are not locked into proprietary software maintenance.
Yeah... a company is going to embrace altruism to the point that they are going to give their competitors a leg up in beating them out of contracts and money. Heck, IBM might as well even right the contracts for these other competitors with their customers too! Here's a hint: If you buy the hardware but do not buy the support, one of only three things can happen: 1) IBM has to jack up their hardware prices to subsidize their Linux efforts (they have to pay those Linux maintainers and programmers with something), which wouldn't be a good thing, or 2) they have to take the hit of all that Linux staff (support and otherwise) as a loss for their business, or 3) they have to get the customers to buy *their* support, somehow, so they can pay their Linux staff. So... what do you think they will do?
At that point either (1) the US loosens up its intellectual property regime, moves away from "software patents" and other bad ideas, and remains competitive on an international economic level... or (2) its relative position in the world begins to slide as India/China and the World realize the economic externalities in an OSS software intellectual property regime and use them to compete.
By definition, they will not compete in intellectual property as OSS opens any IP to all. What then, is left to compete in? Service? The typical OSS service model is many spread out local service folks, all competing against each other for the service contracts. So even if you do develop something good, most/any of the jobs you create will most likely not be in your local economy and the jobs that are created are highly competitive in price which will drive the cost of service to zero. Eventually, the only real area of competition becomes volume of output of OSS code and that doesn't necessarily have any real worth, especially when much of the volume of OSS is simply re-reinventing the wheel. Before long, it seems that OSS will be produced simply for OSS's sake, in the extreme.
The intellectual property regime we are constructing in the US is a deadweight on US international power.... a deadweight that large corporations would love to see remain in place....we are constructing? What planet have you been living on? The USA *really* began IP exportation after WW2 and it has only gotten more and more since. Since the 80s, a large component of the USA's economy has been IP. Make IP worthless and the USA will have a big problem. Not only that, but lots of "little guys" will get mega-screwed in the process.
What I've seen is that most of the people who are most vocal against IP don't understand what IP even is, much less how it is used or by whom.
We used to laugh every time we went into the CompUSA store in Nashua, NH. From the front of the store, huge banners hung over areas in the back of the store where various hardware was displayed. On the right side of the store was this huge banner than read: "Computers" and on the left side of the store, a huge banner read: "Macintosh"
Of course, we also laughed at the appropriate political placement of the Macs as well:)
Similar "reports" (intended to be funny or not) were made back in the early-mid 90s saying the same exact things as this one, just using text that was generated back then. One particular one that I remember actually used papers written for classes in some universities or something instead of limited subsets as mentioned here.
In addition, in casual forums, words like "gonna", "kinda", "l33t", and such will be commonly used and will drive the scores down, as representing incorrectly spelled words if nothing else, (and it can be argued as to which camps will use these things) whereas formal writings will not contain such things. In addition, real-time spell checking functionality of most word processors today will eliminate most spelling issues and flag such casual language as being wrong.
Writing poetry for free and performing performance art doesn't sabotage poets and other artists.
Not even remotely comparable.
One of the major problems today is that copyrights were designed primary to protect the intellectual space. For example, it keeps others from (without my permission) to take my written ideas (poetry, etc.) and making money off it. Patents are more to protect physical processes (physical realm) and the like. I'll patent my new carborator that is so efficient so that my idea is protected and others can't use it without my permission.
The truth is, software straddles both realms and fits neither very well. Software is both intellectual and physical - the ideas and the processes to solve some problem as well as the physical embodiment of those ideas (files, etc.)
Copyrights are about protecting distribution. Patents are about protecting products. Software requires both as it is more akin to a reproducable durable good than just an idea or just a physical thing like a car.
If/when there are matter replicators that can reproduce material things, we'll see similar issues. Right now, automobiles do not have copyrights, they have patents. When an automobile can simply be copied like a Xerox machine copies a document, then there will be issues all over again.
I engage in the community because they aren't engaged in geurilla tactics and fighting/sabotaging everyone.
Funny... the first step in sabotaging a software market is to write something almost as good and give it away free, thereby dropping the bottom out of the market and making it difficult to make money in it and hurting them. It's even better if you can hide behind the premise that you are doing it because software should be Free (as in beer and as in rights) cough/IBM, as an example/cough
I don't believe he uses Free Software; that means that Microsoft is not satisfying their customers, and Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!"
Leapin' Logic Batman! I have NO idea how "Microsoft is not satisfying their customers" in any way implies "Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!".
I don't boot off an SATA drive, but I have one in my system. It worked under FC2 AMD64 but I was able to move to Mandrake 10 AMD64 recently (which also supports it). I think they both pretend it is SCSI.
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Have any of you considered the idea that perhaps Lockheed is big enough to develop the 'business apps' they need in-house, and simply have to port that from Solaris to Linux. I'm thinking that they probably can buy CAD, but their simulators, project management software, and other stuff is all done in-house.
/. belief, it will take a company significant money to develop all these kinds of things in house, which makes *no* sense whatsoever since they already have something that works and what they'd have to develop is completely out of their market (airplanes, missiles, missile systems, etc.)
Have you considered that Lockheed probably does not want to get into the 'business apps' business? Why either devote a fair section of your work force or hire a bunch of new folks to write something that already exists and works? *poof* there goes a big shot of profits for the year(s) spent in development... *thwoop* there goes your TCO up through the chimney and out onto the roof. Contrary to popular
I'm sure "business app provider" is not one of the bullets that Lockheed wants to add to their marketing pamphlets.
...sigh... makes me feel old ;)
This article would have been good except for the massive overuse of the word "hacker".... to the point where I was beginning to wonder whether or not the author really knew what the word means or not.
/.) talking about commonalities among programmers (such as signs of minor autism and such).
Take that, throw in a bit of bias and religion and you have what he wrote.
I think it would have been much better if he had left out all the "hacker" noise and left out the OS religion and kept focused on providing a good workplace and what good programmers want.
Other than that, the article was a less technical and detailed version of another article that came out a while back (and was posted on
After thinking about it more and writing this, my opinion of this post has dropped a bit to the point of just being a poor rehash of previous work.
There are a number of low latency, high performance interconnects out there. The problem is that they are *still* expensive because they don't reach economies of scale that the commodity stuff (Ethernet) does, and won't reach those scales for some time. Not everyone is going to run out and buy Myrinet cards and switches for their home machines so the prices for those are going to be high... maybe not as high as a Cray T3E connecting the same number of processors, but still pretty high. And then... you are limited by the speed of the PCI bus (and PCI-X and PCI-E etc.) What we eventually need is something that is as fast as the processor with near the same latency to memory as the processor for some problems and guess what that turns into.... a form of NUMA (yeah, I read your NUMA comments below :)
:) NUMA scales poorly, you have to throw a lot of hardware at it ... it is a good architecture for lazy programmers.
:) I was involved with MPI in several ways some years back.
BTW the one thing I think would be a worse idea than promoting vector computers is promoting NUMA BTW
Well, NUMA allows folks to use the single system image and shared memory programming paradigms. Some problems map to those pretty well.
Real parallel programming is still done with MPI and its descendants.
Thanks
...and that is one of the problems... The benchmark used to make the Top500 list is an extremely simple one that doesn't reflect some of the harder problems to solve (it actually reflects a rather easy one to solve and one that is very latency tollerant). Those harder problems to solve tend to require at least as performant interconnect as the CPUs themselves.
Ethernet is a very high latency interconnect and is poorly suited to many types of fine grained parallelism. If Ethernet was the end-all, be-all of high performance computing, why did AMD use HyperTransport to interconnect Opterons instead of Ethernet? (or any other high speed NUMA switched network to interconnect processors by any other vendor)
Yes... but it depends on the overhead required for those almost-independent pieces to be transferred from one machine to another. There are lots of fine grained problems out there where All the computers in the world tied together with Ethernet couldn't solve as fast as one good supercomputer.
Basically it boils down to:
Compute the cost for communication of one work unit for your algorithm.
Compute the cost for processing that work unit.
If the cost for communication is significant compared to the computaional cost (say, 1%) then you probably will have a performance issue.
This is why SETI and the like do well. The cost of communication of one WU is insignificant/irrelevant compared to the computational cost of one WU.
However, there are a good number of problems that can't (or at least haven't yet) had algorithms thought out where the cost of the communication of one WU over a high latency interconnect like Ethernet is useful given the amount of computation of that one WU. I assure you, if it were easy to make those problems embarassingly parallel like SETI, someone would have done it already and if you can figure even some of them out, you'd be very wealthy. If you could figure out a way to do it all automatically and do it well, you'd be rich beyond the dreams of avarice!
Clusters (talking about "Beowulf" types and such using stuff like Ethernet, no matter the speed) do OK at coarse grained problems. That is, problems where communication is seldom and typically when it happens, is a chunk of data like a WU or something where the consuming node can go off and compute on it a while then submit some result or intermediate result. All of the "Distributed" projects like SETI are of this type and are even a subclass of coarse grained problems called Embarassingly Parallel.
Fine grained problems typically require much more inter-node communication and are also typically much more sensitive to latency. Fine grained problems typically show lots of communication and (not always, but typically) smaller amounts of data transferred. For example, take a problem where each node will sum up an array of 16 integers passed to it and pass this (partial) sum back to the sender for it to use in its calculations. On 100Mb Ethernet, the latency of the transfer of that 16 bytes is *huge* compared to the full transfer time (overhead of packet size and slowness of the actual transfer) and the computational time for adding 16 integers together. A "Beowulf" cluster would be ill suited to this type of problem simply because Ethernet at those scales is extremely inefficient. However, there are architectures (some SuperComputers) that could do this algorithm quite well.
Another example of this is to think about a kernel (maybe a Linux one) that is multiprocessor. How well would a shared image Linux kernel perform if it were using Ethernet as its interconnect between nodes as opposed to shared memory on a dual/multi CPU motherboard? This is one reason why SGI, Cray, Sun, IBM, and others have developed NUMA architectures - basically the bus between processors is really a switched network that is extremely high bandwidth (GB/s) and extremely low latency (measured in microseconds at worst) in order to run single system images - in order to scale the number of CPUs up in a box that can work on the same problem in parallel.
So, parallel programs are written with a mind to the algorithms being used to solve the problem and the hardware on which it will run. For example, there are a number of algorithms for solving systems of equations in parallel. Different algorithms may be more latency critical than others (some may not be penalized by high latency networks such as Ethernet as others which require more communications). Not all problems have multiple "good" algorithmic solutions where the programmer can pick based on the hardware available. Some problems do not have "good" algorithmic solutions that are latency tollerant at all. Those algorithms/problems need low latency networks to solve and typically, the only solutions are super computers and very "special"/exotic networks (read: expensive) are the ones that supply very low latency interconnects - Myrinet, Giganet, RACE, etc.
I propose a new measure of chip perfomance Specfp_base_2000/Watt thermal load.
The embedded world (embedded as in Mercury, CSPI, Sky, etc.) has been using FLOPS/Watt (FLOPS per Watt) and FLOPS/m^^3 (FLOPS per cubic meter) for a long time as they have always had to compromise heat vs. computational performance vs. volume.
> How could you prove I set out
...and we all know how exhaustive most suites of tests are...
> to intentionally make that error?
The problem is that a typical open source project maintainer will not be concerned with _why_ a patch contains buggy code. Instead, he'll run the current suite of tests, they'll fail, and he'll reject the patch.
It's easy to retort GreenHills FUD by saying all changes will be baselined and a change control board will review any updates (easy enough huh).
Yes... but how will this save the government money? A *competant* control board that has to review every line of code for potential threats has to be knowledgable on the code. This means that they have to have about as many programmers looking at the code as there are people writing the code and with nearly the same knowledge. If that's the case, why don't they just hire the folks to write the code in the first place so that the control board/programming team is even more intimate with the code?
Having a competant control board is not so much different than just hiring the programmers in the first place.
Aside from that, there are plenty of reasons why the government should not open source many of their codes as it may give opposing groups of people a leg up in their technology.
This is at least as safe as closed source - probably moreso due to the fact that many people would be able to go through the code.
The fact that someone *can* go through the code has absolutely no bearing on whether the code is safe or not. The action of someone going through the code may or may not mean the code is safe or not. I *can* go outside and chop that tree that I see out my window down. Unless I actually *do* that action, the tree still stands. Having the ability to do something in no way implies that it will get done.
I have two of the SN41G2s at home that I got about a year and a half ago. One has an Athlon XP 2600+/333 w/ ATI 9800 Pro and the other an Athlon XP 2400+/266 w/ ATI 9600 XT. Both have 1G memory. My fiancee and I use these as our main machines and we carry them every so often over to friends' house for our mini-LAN games (mini being that there are usually only around 6 of us there). They are much easier to transport than any one of our other four tower/mini-tower case machines. Both of the machines run very well and are very performant given their hardware. I'm glad we got these (and so are our backs).
Yeah, but if you took 9 days to write all the CDs, you'd still be at 10 Gbps (9 days of writing, 1 day of flying), which is still pretty high. If you took 99 days to write all the DVDs, you'd be down to 1 Gbps, which is *still* faster than you will transfer anything from LA to Sydney over the normal Internet, even though it took 100 days (1/3 of a year) to arrive =)
and your jumbo comment is flawed in that all transfer rates are given in bits pr second. for a jumbo that would be more like terrabits pr day and would in calculation get a very low bandwidth in b/s terms.
bits per second is an average transfer over time. That 747 full of DVDs has a huge bps transfer rate.
1TB/day * 1day/86400s * 8bits/byte * 1x10^^12 bytes/TB = 92.6 Mbps ~ 100Mbps (near 100Mbps Ethernet speeds =)
and a 747 can easily carry more than 1TB of data worth of DVDs (1TB of DVD is only ~100 DVDs, which will fit in a breadbox easily - I'd imagine a 747 could carry more on the order of a few PB at a time - which would mean a trasfer rate of over 1000 times the number above, which is faster than any generally available wide area network today - ~ 100 Gbps). However, the latency is high(1 day before the first bit arrives at the destination).
There were times (such as when the Pentium was being taped out) when companies shipped entire HDD rack cabinets to the destination because it was much faster (bandwidth) than transfering it over the network.
The age old saying is: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon hurtling down the interstate.
That being said, there are tasks that are latency sensitive, as your talking on the phone example shows.
... or morphine, heroin, or crack, or any other drug that has a very high chance of being abused (through addiction).
IBM has made it clear, in my mind at least, that where they embrace free source software, they do so because they don't have to maintain it
Completely incorrect. Who do you think wrote the initial support for their special hardware needs? Who do you think is going to be called for a fix when some customer who bought support has kernel panics and the like? IBM has a rather large team of Linux maintainers.
that it levels the playing field and makes their fancy service the important part, that customers are not locked into them and they are not locked into proprietary software maintenance.
Yeah... a company is going to embrace altruism to the point that they are going to give their competitors a leg up in beating them out of contracts and money. Heck, IBM might as well even right the contracts for these other competitors with their customers too! Here's a hint: If you buy the hardware but do not buy the support, one of only three things can happen: 1) IBM has to jack up their hardware prices to subsidize their Linux efforts (they have to pay those Linux maintainers and programmers with something), which wouldn't be a good thing, or 2) they have to take the hit of all that Linux staff (support and otherwise) as a loss for their business, or 3) they have to get the customers to buy *their* support, somehow, so they can pay their Linux staff. So... what do you think they will do?
At that point either (1) the US loosens up its intellectual property regime, moves away from "software patents" and other bad ideas, and remains competitive on an international economic level... or (2) its relative position in the world begins to slide as India/China and the World realize the economic externalities in an OSS software intellectual property regime and use them to compete.
...we are constructing? What planet have you been living on? The USA *really* began IP exportation after WW2 and it has only gotten more and more since. Since the 80s, a large component of the USA's economy has been IP. Make IP worthless and the USA will have a big problem. Not only that, but lots of "little guys" will get mega-screwed in the process.
By definition, they will not compete in intellectual property as OSS opens any IP to all. What then, is left to compete in? Service? The typical OSS service model is many spread out local service folks, all competing against each other for the service contracts. So even if you do develop something good, most/any of the jobs you create will most likely not be in your local economy and the jobs that are created are highly competitive in price which will drive the cost of service to zero. Eventually, the only real area of competition becomes volume of output of OSS code and that doesn't necessarily have any real worth, especially when much of the volume of OSS is simply re-reinventing the wheel. Before long, it seems that OSS will be produced simply for OSS's sake, in the extreme.
The intellectual property regime we are constructing in the US is a deadweight on US international power.... a deadweight that large corporations would love to see remain in place.
What I've seen is that most of the people who are most vocal against IP don't understand what IP even is, much less how it is used or by whom.
This is a good explanation for unregistered/unbuffered DDR. Doesn't necessarily hold for registered/buffered DDR though.
We used to laugh every time we went into the CompUSA store in Nashua, NH. From the front of the store, huge banners hung over areas in the back of the store where various hardware was displayed. On the right side of the store was this huge banner than read: "Computers" and on the left side of the store, a huge banner read: "Macintosh"
:)
Of course, we also laughed at the appropriate political placement of the Macs as well
Similar "reports" (intended to be funny or not) were made back in the early-mid 90s saying the same exact things as this one, just using text that was generated back then. One particular one that I remember actually used papers written for classes in some universities or something instead of limited subsets as mentioned here.
In addition, in casual forums, words like "gonna", "kinda", "l33t", and such will be commonly used and will drive the scores down, as representing incorrectly spelled words if nothing else, (and it can be argued as to which camps will use these things) whereas formal writings will not contain such things. In addition, real-time spell checking functionality of most word processors today will eliminate most spelling issues and flag such casual language as being wrong.
Writing poetry for free and performing performance art doesn't sabotage poets and other artists.
Not even remotely comparable.
One of the major problems today is that copyrights were designed primary to protect the intellectual space. For example, it keeps others from (without my permission) to take my written ideas (poetry, etc.) and making money off it. Patents are more to protect physical processes (physical realm) and the like. I'll patent my new carborator that is so efficient so that my idea is protected and others can't use it without my permission.
The truth is, software straddles both realms and fits neither very well. Software is both intellectual and physical - the ideas and the processes to solve some problem as well as the physical embodiment of those ideas (files, etc.)
Copyrights are about protecting distribution. Patents are about protecting products. Software requires both as it is more akin to a reproducable durable good than just an idea or just a physical thing like a car.
If/when there are matter replicators that can reproduce material things, we'll see similar issues. Right now, automobiles do not have copyrights, they have patents. When an automobile can simply be copied like a Xerox machine copies a document, then there will be issues all over again.
I engage in the community because they aren't engaged in geurilla tactics and fighting/sabotaging everyone.
Funny... the first step in sabotaging a software market is to write something almost as good and give it away free, thereby dropping the bottom out of the market and making it difficult to make money in it and hurting them. It's even better if you can hide behind the premise that you are doing it because software should be Free (as in beer and as in rights) cough/IBM, as an example/cough
He feels that with Open GL 1.5 and some of the new ratified standards from the OpenGL ARB, OpenGL is back on par with Direct X 9.0.
Except in the area of the existance of real implementations.
I don't believe he uses Free Software; that means that Microsoft is not satisfying their customers, and Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!"
Leapin' Logic Batman! I have NO idea how "Microsoft is not satisfying their customers" in any way implies "Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!".
I don't boot off an SATA drive, but I have one in my system. It worked under FC2 AMD64 but I was able to move to Mandrake 10 AMD64 recently (which also supports it). I think they both pretend it is SCSI.