A 64-bit processor's dynamic range is approximately 4.3 billion times greater than a 32-bit processor, which simply means, it can work with much larger numbers. Thats Important in applications like rendering, mathmatical calculations, and even database servers.
Funny... I can do 64-bit integer calculations using an 8-bit CPU as long as I don't mind the wait. 64-bit registers just means you can do the operations in one ALU operation instead of multiple.
I wrote a simple matrix/matrix multiplication program on my Athlon64 machine (running FC2 AMD64 because it's the only distro that I can make stable without tons of work) just to see the difference between using 64-bit and 32-bit modes on 64-bit integer data. The 64-bit version of the program was about 5.5X as fast as the 32-bit version when both matrices and the result matrices fit into L1 (or L2 cache), iirc. The 32-bit data running in 32-bit mode was slightly faster than the 32-bit data running in 64-bit mode (I suspect the matrix/matrix multiply doesn't need that many intermediates so it doesn't really need more than 8 GP registers). I can tar it up and post it if anyone cares to see it. All tests were using gcc and very simple algorithms.
Funny... The only folks who I know who build everything from source (assuming when they use Linux) are people at home who are playing around or people who must compile on their own because support for something they use isn't in the normal distributions so they have to add it directly into the source themselves and create custom kernels and what-not.
In any case, in order for Linux to get beyond the "geek" realm, it must get to the point where the vast majority of folks can install and use it straight "out of the box" because the vast majority of the people in the world will have no desire to have to compile anything/everything (IMO).
...so you are saying that only Gentoo actually compiles everything in the distribution in actual 64-bit mode? I use FC2 on my AMD64 and it seems that almost everything I've checked is actually 64-bit compiled.
which would have taken far fuller advantage of the extra 32bits in each register to provide a much fuller experience
First, good discussion here. Not at all what I expected replies to be like on/. You bring up a number of good points as well.
I don't see most of the programming jobs go away anytime soon.
I don't necessarily either. However, I do see many "programming" jobs actually being more of "tech support". More along the lines of tweaking and debugging at the closest to the programming edge of the spectrum and mostly doing tweaks and debugging. I guess another way to classify it would be that I think it will decrease the number of "senior level" programmers and increase the number of "junior level" programmers, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just a different outlook. Especially when many programmers naturally "evolve" to wanting to do more senior level work over time rather than wanting to do junior level work all their life.
This is why my company uses the GPL for everything we do. If a competing project were to come out, they could not legally use our code without giving us access to it or paying us royalties. But you are right. This is a problem.
I'm not sure that they would be required to pay you royalties at all, in any case, but I'm not a lawyer.
How is this different from buying software from a small proprietary software house except that you would not even have the option of hiring someone to fix the program later?
As I mentioned in another reply, using Source Code Escrow is not an uncommon practice.
On the other hand, if you approach it as a business, then you have to look at it very carefully, evaluate the very real traps that OSS poses (IMO, the traps of making proprietary software are just as big or bigger), and carefully formulate your strategy. In this case, you work hard to create your job.
This assumes that most/all OSS is created by this disciplined process. In many cases, OSS code is simply written and put on the 'net for download and forgotten. There are no incentives to make sure the code is good or even works across a number of setups. QA is something that is almost non-existant in many cases. I guess one of the differences is that you assume that OSS is written predominantly by disciplined coders who have a vested interest in developing and maintaining some code base. I assume the opposite. Doing something as a hobby isn't the same as doing it for a living. In some cases, a hobbyist will do a better job, but in some cases, a hobbyist can simply stop doing it and people who depend on him have no assurances as to when this will happen.
The one big advantage of open source here is that you can at least hire someone to pick up the pieces for you. If a closed-source product disappears, you're totally screwed.
This is not entirely true. Several companies I have worked for (and with) over the years set up Source Code Escrow agreements with their clients (typically this is not just shrink wrapped software you find on the shelf in BestBuy) exactly for these cases. If the software company goes away, or the product is dropped by the company, the customers who have the product get all the source code to it as well and can "do stuff" with it (exactly what and to what extent depends on the agreement).
This actually took place with one company I worked for a while back. We were bought out by a larger company (who had a competing product) and then our company was shut down (and everyone layed off). The companies that had source code escrow agreements with our company each then had access to the source code for the product. A couple of those customers then hired some of our tech support/programming staff (who were recently layed off) to continue development and support for the product.
The problem with FLOSS is that it spreads the cost of development more efficiently than even Microsoft's model. Therefore, it has a much lower critical mass than Microsoft.
Unfortunately, it turns the software market into a service market. Many of the programming jobs today will go away and be replaced with support jobs, which are typically lower paying. In the end, although supposedly anyone can contribute to OSS, there will be few pain programmers to really work on it and most/all the work comes from those who either don't need money or do it in their spare time. The closest thing to a programming technical job most programmers of today will have will be tech support jobs. This reduces the number of programmers because you can't make a living of it anymore.
Add this to the fact that most of the USA's (I live there, so it is relevant in this way to me) "export" is actually intellectual property. Do away with that and the USA will fall on hard times. At the same time, OSS increases competition from abroad in that the code that you write will be and is used by your competitors to get a leg up on you. So, not only are you helping yourself, but you are helping yourself out of a means of making a living.
Also, aside from a few well supported projects, many projects (just check Sourceforge) do not get updated or bug fixed that often. What I've seen in the OSS field (aside from the few well supported "glamorous" projects) is that initially, there is some interest in the application so it is kept up to date. But since there is no real incentive to keep it going past the initial glitz phase, updates come fewer and farther between until it stagnates. Over time, if a company wants to really "buy into" using some non-glamorous OSS software, in a few years, if they want to keep using it, they will eventually have to hire a programmer (or a few) to do what they want done to the project. Since contractors frequently charge $100/hour to do things like this, even simple modifications to their product may take many $1000s of dollars. One could argue that these $1000s would be comparable to paying yearly licenses, but software companies have a vested interest in updating the software periodically, so that each year, the people using the software will possibly get a little more use out of each new version, while the other company may spend a couple of years with no new functionality before they hire the expensive programmers to give them what they want, effectively meaning potentially lost productivity of their employees for a few years.
This is just an extended example, of course, but it is something that I see most OSS advocates simply ignore or wave away as not being an issue. Most OSS advocates seem to think that there is or will be some magical job market or product that they will come up with that will keep them fed. In truth, this is a very optimistic prediction. What will happen, in my opinion, is what I mentioned above. Most people who think of themselves as programmers today will eventually be forced to basically become tech support (not that there is anything wrong with that position, it's just that many programmers don't want to be in that role) to make ends meet, at best, in the computer field. I say that while OSS will initially drive a big push for a while, mostly because it is "new" to most people so it will have a lot of flash, glamour, glitz, and attractiveness, it will hit a peak and then drop off and the end result will be the job market for programmers will be worse than what it is today, and probably as bad as it was during the Internet Bubble Burst.
I agree with you. OSS going mainstream isn't going to make very many people wealthy because more folks will use it because of the cost (nothing) than any other reason as long as there is equivalent functionality compared to something that costs (and compatibility with their friends' stuff and games).
By being hired as consultants to make things work.
This isn't very sustainable. When a closed source application costs $300, people freak and say use OSS and hire a consultant. I haven't seen a consultant in a while that charges less than $50/hour and many charge much more than that. In addition, I don't think many folks (non-businesses) will hire consultants at that rate to "make things work" at home.
I work for a bioinformatics software company that would not have existed without open source. When you start on your own dime, you most likely cannot afford proprietary unix, databases, etc. My company, in existence for 4 years now, will owe a lot to open source if we survive.
Exactly... and how much have you paid back to OSS?
Unless Microsoft and the rest of the megacorps succeed in cementing their monopoly power with the help of fascist government, we'll be waving goodbye to them soon enough; in their place will be thousands of self-sufficient open source hackers. ....and feeding themselves how? OSS folks assume that the market can bear any number of OSS "hackers" when this is false. As more OSS "hackers" get into the picture, the chances of finding a way to support yourself being an OSS "hacker" will become harder and even worse is that if you write something, anyone can come along and support it for cheaper than you if they want, making your options even worse. Self sufficiency means you can support yourself. I guess if you say that all your OSS "hackers" will also grow their own garden for food and such, then maybe you'll be right. OSS "hacking" isn't immune from economies of scale and will demonstrate the same trends.
Just a word about the word "hacker". Anyone who calls himself a "hacker" most certainly isn't.
We have VMWare installed on all our machines here. I could, if I wanted do the same by just running around with some media with my virtual machine on it. You can even suspend/snapshot your session and when you get back in, you are back at exactly where you left off.
The only problem is that this requires VMWare to be installed everywhere, which isn't likely right now. However, Intel (and others) are working on hardware support for virtual machines and the like, I imagine it won't be far off when OSs will be based on this type of technology (yes, like the artical says).
Over a decade ago, I saw robots (non-humanoid) delivering such things as laundry baskets to various parts of a hospital. The "brain" was some Micro-VAX computers and the robots looked like boxes that followed tracks in the floor.
When the second Highlander movie first came out at the theatres, we were all excited to go see it but I couldn't for some reason (we were in school at the time so probably some project) but my friends did. They came back and told me to never go see it because it was so bad that it ruined the first one. I took his advice and I have never seen any Highlander movie other than the first one.
Similarly with The Matrix, I loved that movie and to me, it was complete at the end of it. I was surprised to learn that the 2nd and 3rd were actually planned parts of a trilogy instead of just milking the franchise. The 2nd and 3rd were OK if you dissociate them from the first one and just look at them as Sci-Fi action movies on their own but they really detract from the first movie, IMO.
Forcing users to the shell will, eventually, teach them how the OS works. Or at least, give them a brief idea on what's going on "under the hood".
Why would they care? Do they care how their microwave works or just that it works? Do they care how their television works or that it just works? Or... even closer, does someone have to know how a calculator works in order to use it?
This attitude is one of the worst ones in the Linux/OSS world. Computers are tools to be used to solve problems, not ends unto themselves. Folks like you and me like to know how a computer works. We are a small minority of the population of the world. Most folks just want the computer to turn on and play their games or run some financial software, or send/receive email. They don't care how it does it, just that it does it. Folks don't usually buy a computer to complicate their lives or to be used as an experimental device to learn about... they buy it to do something for them.
Unfortunately, there are few computers that come close to not being a complication of their lives and those are the set-top boxes such as Playstations, XBox, GameCube, Tivo, and the like.
I'll admit sometimes software is a PITA when the right dependencies aren't taken care of, but no program has ever taken me "half-days and days" to install...
Me either... if it takes me longer than 30 minutes to install, I remove any and all traces of it from my drives because it is a complete piece of crap. Unfortunately, there's a bit of software like that.
The other thing that is a pain in the ass is that many OSS projects always use the latest/greatest libraries and, in order to install the stuff, you have to upgrade half your system, which then causes the very real possibility that you'll break something else because Linux is constantly "evolving".
The thing is that many OSS projects are done by people who don't have the discipline to really develop a "product". They don't think about the impacts and consequences of doing some things and cause massive headaches to those not running the latest/greatest. Many OSS projects have the cavalier attitude that folks will willingly upgrade everything just to run their stuff.
This is not a new thing in the least. Such a thing has existed for a number of years. Perhaps this one is "new" because it is higher resolution or something than the previous ones.
The network is owned by the school. If you don't agree to the terms, with a waiver of liability, you don't use the network. Simple enough. If you don't agree with it, move off campus and get your own ISP and network. If you can't afford to live off campus, either do without a computer because you don't agree with the terms, or agree to the terms and use their network. Simple. There is nothing complicated here.
Heh, we used to have this big rubber frog (about as big as a dinner plate) that got passed around. If you broke a build, you had to keep the frog in your cube until someone else broke the build, then you could pass the frog along. The problem is, everyone was pretty careful about not breaking the build so you could own the frog for a long time, sometimes.
Then we can write our own damned code to do it which will be untainted by MS's code, of little return value to them, and allow us to compete directly....and how exactly would this benefit Microsoft? Why would they *want* to give you the tools to compete directly with them? Why do you think F/OSS needs all this help from Microsoft to be able to compete?
[quote]It seems that Fabian Franz from the Knoppix Project hacked up a 'FreeNX Server' based on NoMachine's NX technology (poor NoMachine might lose business now). [/quote]
Yeah, unfortunately, this is always the case. Any time some software becomes desirable, someone can make a F/OSS version of it and undermine the whole market. Welcome to F/OSS.
[quote]Heh, you obviously don't understand the point of Free software. In general, having that product available as Free software will attract much more users than the few at that particular company that might go out of business. If they are -smart-, they will assist the open source development effort, and re-tailor their business to provide expert integration solutions of FreeNX, etc. It's all about -service- and developing code, not re-selling code over and over again without doing any work. That's the difference. They don't have to go out of business, just change their old business model.[/quote]
Your description sounds a bit like extortion...
In any case, it isn't about developing code at all. F/OSS is all about service and turning programming into a service instead of a trade. The end result is that it drives all prices to zero, even for service. For instance, I could, if I were already independently wealty, study up and devote my life to offering good/great services for free (as in beer) for any particular F/OSS software that I wanted and basically starve the folks who make the software out, effectively taking over their project. For example, if I offered support for RedHat stuff even almost as good as RedHat does, but for free, it's entirely possible that RedHat would go bankrupt because anyone could download their distributions for free and "hire" me for free. RedHat foots the bill for their folks and no return. Welcome to F/OSS.
The other thing that F/OSS enforces and encourages is mediocrity. Most folks will download for free (as in beer) anything that does a "good enough" job for what they want, even though it doesn't necessarily do anything better than other offerings and is potentially more buggy and less useful. This starves out the better application and it goes away, leaving everyone with just the "good enough" left for everyone to use and just "make do" with.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, you can do it either way with VMWare. We use VMWare at work a lot. I host various Linux VMs on my Win2k box, for example.
The Type R sticker is a better upgrade than the racing stripes as that is faster.
A 64-bit processor's dynamic range is approximately 4.3 billion times greater than a 32-bit processor, which simply means, it can work with much larger numbers. Thats Important in applications like rendering, mathmatical calculations, and even database servers .
Funny... I can do 64-bit integer calculations using an 8-bit CPU as long as I don't mind the wait. 64-bit registers just means you can do the operations in one ALU operation instead of multiple.
I wrote a simple matrix/matrix multiplication program on my Athlon64 machine (running FC2 AMD64 because it's the only distro that I can make stable without tons of work) just to see the difference between using 64-bit and 32-bit modes on 64-bit integer data. The 64-bit version of the program was about 5.5X as fast as the 32-bit version when both matrices and the result matrices fit into L1 (or L2 cache), iirc. The 32-bit data running in 32-bit mode was slightly faster than the 32-bit data running in 64-bit mode (I suspect the matrix/matrix multiply doesn't need that many intermediates so it doesn't really need more than 8 GP registers). I can tar it up and post it if anyone cares to see it. All tests were using gcc and very simple algorithms.
I never got the hardware mod for it, I just ran the software version. It ran like a 0.17MHz PC! but it did work.
Funny... The only folks who I know who build everything from source (assuming when they use Linux) are people at home who are playing around or people who must compile on their own because support for something they use isn't in the normal distributions so they have to add it directly into the source themselves and create custom kernels and what-not.
In any case, in order for Linux to get beyond the "geek" realm, it must get to the point where the vast majority of folks can install and use it straight "out of the box" because the vast majority of the people in the world will have no desire to have to compile anything/everything (IMO).
...so you are saying that only Gentoo actually compiles everything in the distribution in actual 64-bit mode? I use FC2 on my AMD64 and it seems that almost everything I've checked is actually 64-bit compiled.
which would have taken far fuller advantage of the extra 32bits in each register to provide a much fuller experience
And I have *no* idea what this statement means...
First, good discussion here. Not at all what I expected replies to be like on /. You bring up a number of good points as well.
I don't see most of the programming jobs go away anytime soon.
I don't necessarily either. However, I do see many "programming" jobs actually being more of "tech support". More along the lines of tweaking and debugging at the closest to the programming edge of the spectrum and mostly doing tweaks and debugging. I guess another way to classify it would be that I think it will decrease the number of "senior level" programmers and increase the number of "junior level" programmers, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just a different outlook. Especially when many programmers naturally "evolve" to wanting to do more senior level work over time rather than wanting to do junior level work all their life.
This is why my company uses the GPL for everything we do. If a competing project were to come out, they could not legally use our code without giving us access to it or paying us royalties. But you are right. This is a problem.
I'm not sure that they would be required to pay you royalties at all, in any case, but I'm not a lawyer.
How is this different from buying software from a small proprietary software house except that you would not even have the option of hiring someone to fix the program later?
As I mentioned in another reply, using Source Code Escrow is not an uncommon practice.
On the other hand, if you approach it as a business, then you have to look at it very carefully, evaluate the very real traps that OSS poses (IMO, the traps of making proprietary software are just as big or bigger), and carefully formulate your strategy. In this case, you work hard to create your job.
This assumes that most/all OSS is created by this disciplined process. In many cases, OSS code is simply written and put on the 'net for download and forgotten. There are no incentives to make sure the code is good or even works across a number of setups. QA is something that is almost non-existant in many cases. I guess one of the differences is that you assume that OSS is written predominantly by disciplined coders who have a vested interest in developing and maintaining some code base. I assume the opposite. Doing something as a hobby isn't the same as doing it for a living. In some cases, a hobbyist will do a better job, but in some cases, a hobbyist can simply stop doing it and people who depend on him have no assurances as to when this will happen.
The one big advantage of open source here is that you can at least hire someone to pick up the pieces for you. If a closed-source product disappears, you're totally screwed.
This is not entirely true. Several companies I have worked for (and with) over the years set up Source Code Escrow agreements with their clients (typically this is not just shrink wrapped software you find on the shelf in BestBuy) exactly for these cases. If the software company goes away, or the product is dropped by the company, the customers who have the product get all the source code to it as well and can "do stuff" with it (exactly what and to what extent depends on the agreement).
This actually took place with one company I worked for a while back. We were bought out by a larger company (who had a competing product) and then our company was shut down (and everyone layed off). The companies that had source code escrow agreements with our company each then had access to the source code for the product. A couple of those customers then hired some of our tech support/programming staff (who were recently layed off) to continue development and support for the product.
The problem with FLOSS is that it spreads the cost of development more efficiently than even Microsoft's model. Therefore, it has a much lower critical mass than Microsoft.
Unfortunately, it turns the software market into a service market. Many of the programming jobs today will go away and be replaced with support jobs, which are typically lower paying. In the end, although supposedly anyone can contribute to OSS, there will be few pain programmers to really work on it and most/all the work comes from those who either don't need money or do it in their spare time. The closest thing to a programming technical job most programmers of today will have will be tech support jobs. This reduces the number of programmers because you can't make a living of it anymore.
Add this to the fact that most of the USA's (I live there, so it is relevant in this way to me) "export" is actually intellectual property. Do away with that and the USA will fall on hard times. At the same time, OSS increases competition from abroad in that the code that you write will be and is used by your competitors to get a leg up on you. So, not only are you helping yourself, but you are helping yourself out of a means of making a living.
Also, aside from a few well supported projects, many projects (just check Sourceforge) do not get updated or bug fixed that often. What I've seen in the OSS field (aside from the few well supported "glamorous" projects) is that initially, there is some interest in the application so it is kept up to date. But since there is no real incentive to keep it going past the initial glitz phase, updates come fewer and farther between until it stagnates. Over time, if a company wants to really "buy into" using some non-glamorous OSS software, in a few years, if they want to keep using it, they will eventually have to hire a programmer (or a few) to do what they want done to the project. Since contractors frequently charge $100/hour to do things like this, even simple modifications to their product may take many $1000s of dollars. One could argue that these $1000s would be comparable to paying yearly licenses, but software companies have a vested interest in updating the software periodically, so that each year, the people using the software will possibly get a little more use out of each new version, while the other company may spend a couple of years with no new functionality before they hire the expensive programmers to give them what they want, effectively meaning potentially lost productivity of their employees for a few years.
This is just an extended example, of course, but it is something that I see most OSS advocates simply ignore or wave away as not being an issue. Most OSS advocates seem to think that there is or will be some magical job market or product that they will come up with that will keep them fed. In truth, this is a very optimistic prediction. What will happen, in my opinion, is what I mentioned above. Most people who think of themselves as programmers today will eventually be forced to basically become tech support (not that there is anything wrong with that position, it's just that many programmers don't want to be in that role) to make ends meet, at best, in the computer field. I say that while OSS will initially drive a big push for a while, mostly because it is "new" to most people so it will have a lot of flash, glamour, glitz, and attractiveness, it will hit a peak and then drop off and the end result will be the job market for programmers will be worse than what it is today, and probably as bad as it was during the Internet Bubble Burst.
I agree with you. OSS going mainstream isn't going to make very many people wealthy because more folks will use it because of the cost (nothing) than any other reason as long as there is equivalent functionality compared to something that costs (and compatibility with their friends' stuff and games).
By being hired as consultants to make things work.
This isn't very sustainable. When a closed source application costs $300, people freak and say use OSS and hire a consultant. I haven't seen a consultant in a while that charges less than $50/hour and many charge much more than that. In addition, I don't think many folks (non-businesses) will hire consultants at that rate to "make things work" at home.
I work for a bioinformatics software company that would not have existed without open source. When you start on your own dime, you most likely cannot afford proprietary unix, databases, etc. My company, in existence for 4 years now, will owe a lot to open source if we survive.
Exactly... and how much have you paid back to OSS?
Unless Microsoft and the rest of the megacorps succeed in cementing their monopoly power with the help of fascist government, we'll be waving goodbye to them soon enough; in their place will be thousands of self-sufficient open source hackers. ....and feeding themselves how? OSS folks assume that the market can bear any number of OSS "hackers" when this is false. As more OSS "hackers" get into the picture, the chances of finding a way to support yourself being an OSS "hacker" will become harder and even worse is that if you write something, anyone can come along and support it for cheaper than you if they want, making your options even worse. Self sufficiency means you can support yourself. I guess if you say that all your OSS "hackers" will also grow their own garden for food and such, then maybe you'll be right. OSS "hacking" isn't immune from economies of scale and will demonstrate the same trends.
Just a word about the word "hacker". Anyone who calls himself a "hacker" most certainly isn't.
We have VMWare installed on all our machines here. I could, if I wanted do the same by just running around with some media with my virtual machine on it. You can even suspend/snapshot your session and when you get back in, you are back at exactly where you left off.
The only problem is that this requires VMWare to be installed everywhere, which isn't likely right now. However, Intel (and others) are working on hardware support for virtual machines and the like, I imagine it won't be far off when OSs will be based on this type of technology (yes, like the artical says).
Over a decade ago, I saw robots (non-humanoid) delivering such things as laundry baskets to various parts of a hospital. The "brain" was some Micro-VAX computers and the robots looked like boxes that followed tracks in the floor.
Ditto to this and its parent.
When the second Highlander movie first came out at the theatres, we were all excited to go see it but I couldn't for some reason (we were in school at the time so probably some project) but my friends did. They came back and told me to never go see it because it was so bad that it ruined the first one. I took his advice and I have never seen any Highlander movie other than the first one.
Similarly with The Matrix, I loved that movie and to me, it was complete at the end of it. I was surprised to learn that the 2nd and 3rd were actually planned parts of a trilogy instead of just milking the franchise. The 2nd and 3rd were OK if you dissociate them from the first one and just look at them as Sci-Fi action movies on their own but they really detract from the first movie, IMO.
Forcing users to the shell will, eventually, teach them how the OS works. Or at least, give them a brief idea on what's going on "under the hood".
Why would they care? Do they care how their microwave works or just that it works? Do they care how their television works or that it just works? Or... even closer, does someone have to know how a calculator works in order to use it?
This attitude is one of the worst ones in the Linux/OSS world. Computers are tools to be used to solve problems, not ends unto themselves. Folks like you and me like to know how a computer works. We are a small minority of the population of the world. Most folks just want the computer to turn on and play their games or run some financial software, or send/receive email. They don't care how it does it, just that it does it. Folks don't usually buy a computer to complicate their lives or to be used as an experimental device to learn about... they buy it to do something for them.
Unfortunately, there are few computers that come close to not being a complication of their lives and those are the set-top boxes such as Playstations, XBox, GameCube, Tivo, and the like.
I'll admit sometimes software is a PITA when the right dependencies aren't taken care of, but no program has ever taken me "half-days and days" to install...
Me either... if it takes me longer than 30 minutes to install, I remove any and all traces of it from my drives because it is a complete piece of crap. Unfortunately, there's a bit of software like that.
The other thing that is a pain in the ass is that many OSS projects always use the latest/greatest libraries and, in order to install the stuff, you have to upgrade half your system, which then causes the very real possibility that you'll break something else because Linux is constantly "evolving".
The thing is that many OSS projects are done by people who don't have the discipline to really develop a "product". They don't think about the impacts and consequences of doing some things and cause massive headaches to those not running the latest/greatest. Many OSS projects have the cavalier attitude that folks will willingly upgrade everything just to run their stuff.
This is not a new thing in the least. Such a thing has existed for a number of years. Perhaps this one is "new" because it is higher resolution or something than the previous ones.
because that is the only area in which we are currently weak.
Beware of speaking in absolutes. It usually means that you are missing something.
The network is owned by the school. If you don't agree to the terms, with a waiver of liability, you don't use the network. Simple enough. If you don't agree with it, move off campus and get your own ISP and network. If you can't afford to live off campus, either do without a computer because you don't agree with the terms, or agree to the terms and use their network. Simple. There is nothing complicated here.
Heh, we used to have this big rubber frog (about as big as a dinner plate) that got passed around. If you broke a build, you had to keep the frog in your cube until someone else broke the build, then you could pass the frog along. The problem is, everyone was pretty careful about not breaking the build so you could own the frog for a long time, sometimes.
Then we can write our own damned code to do it which will be untainted by MS's code, of little return value to them, and allow us to compete directly. ...and how exactly would this benefit Microsoft? Why would they *want* to give you the tools to compete directly with them? Why do you think F/OSS needs all this help from Microsoft to be able to compete?
[quote]It seems that Fabian Franz from the Knoppix Project hacked up a 'FreeNX Server' based on NoMachine's NX technology (poor NoMachine might lose business now). [/quote]
Yeah, unfortunately, this is always the case. Any time some software becomes desirable, someone can make a F/OSS version of it and undermine the whole market. Welcome to F/OSS.
[quote]Heh, you obviously don't understand the point of Free software. In general, having that product available as Free software will attract much more users than the few at that particular company that might go out of business. If they are -smart-, they will assist the open source development effort, and re-tailor their business to provide expert integration solutions of FreeNX, etc.
It's all about -service- and developing code, not re-selling code over and over again without doing any work. That's the difference. They don't have to go out of business, just change their old business model.[/quote]
Your description sounds a bit like extortion...
In any case, it isn't about developing code at all. F/OSS is all about service and turning programming into a service instead of a trade. The end result is that it drives all prices to zero, even for service. For instance, I could, if I were already independently wealty, study up and devote my life to offering good/great services for free (as in beer) for any particular F/OSS software that I wanted and basically starve the folks who make the software out, effectively taking over their project. For example, if I offered support for RedHat stuff even almost as good as RedHat does, but for free, it's entirely possible that RedHat would go bankrupt because anyone could download their distributions for free and "hire" me for free. RedHat foots the bill for their folks and no return. Welcome to F/OSS.
The other thing that F/OSS enforces and encourages is mediocrity. Most folks will download for free (as in beer) anything that does a "good enough" job for what they want, even though it doesn't necessarily do anything better than other offerings and is potentially more buggy and less useful. This starves out the better application and it goes away, leaving everyone with just the "good enough" left for everyone to use and just "make do" with.
TNG was just the "let's see what kind of paradox we can have with time travel and/or alternate dimensions this week" series.