Companies do NOT use Free Software (for the most part, the small minority does NOT count). Companies probably aren't going to move to free alternatives anytime soon.
Man are you clueless. Do you really think that a huge company like Oracle would port their DB to Linux and then be doing a big marketing push of Oracle and Linux if "Companies do NOT use Free Software"? Do you really think that IBM would throw away billions (USD) for a free OS when "Companies do NOT use Free Software"? Did you know that the Free Software program Apache is used by more sites then IIS? Some stats for the clueless:
Linux server sales for the fourth quarter 2003, up 90 percent. By contrast, overall U.S. server revenue climbed just 5 percent in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier.
75 percent of IBM's blade servers shipments run Linux.
Fourth quarter 2003 Linux server increases
over fourth quarter of the pervious year:
IBM Linux sales up +112%
HP Linux sales up +81%
Dell Linux sales up +66%
This is just in the US, things are even better
outside of the USA. Before you spread FUD, get your facts straight.
While Linux may well co-exist with say the mainframe OSes or FreeBSD or QNX, I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will let it co-exist with Windows. If they keep 90%+ of the desktop they'll kill Linux in the server. They've shown no desire previously to co-exist with anything, and I can't see them starting now.
MS has had 90%+ of the desktop for a while now, and yet Linux on the server is growing exponentialy. More and more big time players like Oracle, HP, IBM, SAP, Sun and now PeopleSoft are supporting Linux. These heavy weights won't let their investments just die off. People are moving Linux to servers and the data centers and MS can't stop it. While having the the desktop market may help with small companies, it does little for larger corporations, and large corporations is where the majority of IT money comes from. I work for a fortune 500 enterprise and we are moving more and more of our data center to Linux and Solaris. We went with J2EE over.Not. Most of our desktops are MS windows and that had no effect on our decision for a server environmnet.
You need members to have a movement, if MS can reclaim the businesses it's lost and/or stop hardware vendors from supporting it. Linux will have lost, it'll be that thing we tried back at the millenium and it will die.
Linux will always have memebers. While commercial members help, they are not needed. MS can't stop the big hardware vendors because most of them use industry standards which can be implemented in Linux. Linux has very good hardware support for having little vendor support. People can always write drivers and reverse engineer for compatibility. Also, MS has no control over the hardware industry. Players like Dell, HP and IBM have far more sway. Dell, HP and IBM are the ones selling all that hardware, NOT MS. Also, you are only thinking in terms of the US market. MS has far less power outside of the US. The US only makes up 5% of the worlds population. Nations like German, Mexico, India, China, etc are using Open Source much more now and some are passing laws requiring the government to perfer Open Source. Linux's future look nice. You just have too look at the REAL picture and not the picture the MS FUD campaign is trying to paint.
That is because of a monopoly that refuses to
use standards. Has undocumented API's, proprietary document formats, propreitary protocols. They take a standard and "embrace and extend" it and push it out to their 90%+ desktop market and have just made a new standard that no one else can participate in. Do it the MS way or get lost. Sorry, I have morals and I believe that our society can do better and put human advancemnet before monitary gain. I boycott products and companies that I feel are unethical. There are many people that bitch and moan, yet they do not take action. I have been using Linux for about 5 years and exclusively for 2 1/2 years. When I switched exclusively to Linux, it was a little rocky. However, once I learned the OS and how to find help and help myself, there was not any single task I could not do.
Oh, and do you really think all the hardware support under ms windows has anything to do with ms windows? No. It is the hardware manufactuers that make all those drivers, not Microsoft. If you use Linux and some hardware is not supported, then complain to the manufactuer and use your money to get the support you need to make the choices you want. When I bought a digital camera, I found a manufactuer that uses a standard usb mass-storage and then supported them for making that decision with my money. The camera works perfectly under Linux. I have a ton of hardware for my systems at home. All the hardware works great with Linux becuase I did a little research before I purchased and then I support manufactuers for support Linux with my money and also by explicitly thanking them for supporting Linux and letting them know that the one of the main reasons I chose them was becuase of that Linux suppport.
There are too many lazy people out there that want to complain and yet take no action. If more people were to take action then support for Linux across the board would grow by leaps -n- bounds.
Sorry, MS did NOT invent cleartype. It was around apple for a long time. The Microsoft "Hall of Innovation"
Have you tried Redhat 9? The fonts using XFree86 4.3.x with Xfont look much better on my laptop then they did with MS Windows XP and clear type. Whit cleartype there was too colour fringing.
**Linux has a long way to go for smooth MultiMedia usage.
What are you talking about? I have been able
to play any DVD I have tried with Linux using MPlayer or Xine. I have been able to play any multimedia I have wanted with MPlayer. I can listen to ogg, mp3, etc. I can watch MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 with no problems. Didn't you just read how the animated film Sinbad was made entirely with Linux? I wonder how they could make a feature length animation using Linux with its poor multimedia support? I wonder how others have been able to use Linux on other films like LOTR, Scooby Doo, and others? Yes the multimedia is just crappy. I wonder how I can use my digital camera without problems? I wonder how I can use pendrives, media readers, tv cards etc with Linux. Hmmm.
**Wow, look at all the evidence you back this up with. Sure,
I don't use Hotmail or Passport 'cause I don't need to, but IIS?
Have you used the one in Server 2003 or are you just going off of
the Code Red scare?
Umm, sorry. IIS in 2003 has not been out nearly long enough to say
anything about its merits let alone its security or lack therof.
Come back in a year or two when all the crackers have had their fun.
One big problem with a rewrite is that you lose all those bug fixes
and security fixes.
**If they were separate programs, it would be harder to work together
and actually less secure because they would be in separate process spaces
so allowing only the calendar to talk to email and not other stuff is harder
to do. How about you offer some valid reasons why they should be separate
programs?
Again, your are way off. How are programs running
in a seperate process space insecure? You want
programs in a seperate process space to create security and
stablity between two different applications. The way programs
have been desinged to interact is by using something called a
standard. This is how all these servers can talk to one
another, how you can browse the web and do many more things.
MS has standards that they use
for their own programs. Though they are just a greedy monopoly
and do not believe in sharing or encouraging standards compliance.
They want to keep their "standards" proprietary and call them
"trade secrets" or "IP". What if every other programmer or
corporation took this same approach? We would not have servers
that could talk over tcp/ip, the internet, etc because everyone
would be doing their own thing like MS.
**So you don't like a couple of their programs (such as IE).
Use something else and be happy!
Again, with MS practices, it is very difficult to exercise free
choice. You have to fight against "integrated" products, closed
protocols, closed document formats, etc. MS does not want
any user or corporation to have choice and they have continually shown
that. If they cared about their customers having the ability to make
a choice, then they would work with standards compliant technologies. If
they want to "extened" a techonology, they would share that back with
the IT world and have the extensions become part of the standard intstead
of hoarding it.
What I find sad is just how effective the MS FUD and marketing machine really
is. You seem to actually believe the stuff that you are spewing. No corporatioin
becomes an monopoly by caring about choice, standards or customers. They get
there by unethical business practices.
The thing is many people think the purpose of Linux is to "beat" MS windows. While I think that it will surpass MS in the server area, the desktop may or may not happen, or it may take a number of years for the desktop. But the most important point is that Linux will ALWAYS be around and it is not a competitor of any OS. It is a movement "By the Poeople and For the People". So whether it "beats" MS and takes 90% of the desktop and or server market does not matter. There will always be plenty of developers working on it commercially, academically and non-commercially.
There is currently too much commercial money in Linux from many different players for it to just "go away". Also, MS's typical tactics that they use to "beat" the competition won't work on Linux. Price cuts may keep some from switching, however many that want to switch do it not just because of cost, but also choice. People and companies are tired of the MS slogan of give them the razors and sell them the blades. Most people are not dumb enough to buy into getting heavy discounts from MS. Because they all know that MS will try to make it back some other way once they are locked in. Many people and companies are also tired of the anti-competitve tactics and their freedom of choice being taken away. When you build your infrastructure on MS, then all those app you use are designed to function "best" when you ONLY use other MS stuff. I personally think that MS's goal is to be the ONE developer of all software. Sure, some of the small meaningless shareware type stuff will still float around. But for any of the bigger apps, protocols and codecs, MS wants to hoarde that and be the only controller. It kind of reminds me of a "One Ring to Rule Them All" type of deal.
The Mobility works fine with the DRI Radeon driver
and I get about 792 FPS from glxgears which sucks
compared to my NVidia GF3 Ti500 but it plays Linux RTCW fine. Without the Intel 845 (Brookdale) Chipset AGP, it probabaly would not work.
Run this command from a terminal: glxinfo | grep 'direct rendering:'
If you don't get a "Yes" then you do not have
accelerated 3D going. I think that the radeon driver needs to use 16Bit mode which you can set to
the defalut in your/etc/X11/XF86Config.
Umm, you don't need to do any of this with the RPM's. Just rpm -ivh NVidia.foo.rpm. Or you you have the src rpm, rpmbuild --rebuild NVidia-src.rpm and then install the new rpm under/usr/src/redhat/RPM/foo.rpm.
Not with NVidia. Take a look here: Nvidia Linux
They support Linux IA32, Linux AMD64, Linux IA64 and
FreeBSD. They support their chipsets, etc. I also think a good portion of Intel's stuff is "offcically" supported under Linux like their graphics chips and audio. And even if they do not release a driver, they provide the specs which is more usefull to Linux then a proprietry driver in most cases.
The DRI supports ATI cards with 2D and some 3D. On my laptop I have an Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500] that works well with DRI. I was playing the Linux version of RTCW last night. However there are a few "proprietary" features that the DRI does not support because ATI does not release the specs. The NVidia cards on the other hand, have a common driver core. So any feature under the ms-windows driver will be present under the Linux driver. While I prefer open source, I don't mind if a manufactuer releases closed source drivers such as NVidia if they are of good quality. The NVidia drivers are just great IMO and I will only purchase from them in the future.
Actually it is really easy to have the ms windows boot loader boot Linux. Well I think it only works for NT/2k/xp. All you do is install grub or lilo on the partition that Linux is on and then copy the first 512 bytes of that partition to a floppy. Boot into winders and copy that file to your C:\ drive and modify C:\boot.ini Booting Linux from the NT Boot Menu
Doesn't the Xbox have an NVidia card? If so, NVidia fully supports their cards under Linux with ALL the functionality that the ms windows drivers have since they use a common code base.
In most places it is legal to reverse engineer things for compatibility and/or personal use. So they did not break any laws there.
Next, they are not using a derivitive work. They are not using MS source code and then basing code on that. They have a method to modify personal property to allow compatibility with other software, again perfectly legal in most places and there is no derivation involved.
Look at software like samba. It is widely used and was developed by reverse engineering the MS smb protocol. MS can't stop it since it is not a crime to reverse engineer for compatibility.
"Isolated memory spaces, interrupt handling, etc. - those exist only in kernel space only if that's the only place where you want it, not because there's some compsci-theoretical reason that it "has" to be there. Embedded systems regularly have a poorly defined difference between "kernel mode" and "user mode". On x86 systems, it's clear because the system is usually set up to not be able to execute certain instructions unless it's in supervisory (ring 0) mode. On other systems, it's not necessarily true."
Well I was not refering to embedded systems which
are a whole different game from a "normal" OS. Would you want to switch between kernel land and user land for each interrupt in a "normal" OS kernel?
"The library lack is also pointless if you're doing low level coding (yah... lacking printf might suck, but it's always nice knowing where the UART registers are!) where you honestly couldn't give a rat's ass about stdlib functions."
Again, look at the Linux kernel, many things are re-implemented like printk, linked lists etc.
"Your point is (somewhat) correct, if a bit naive, if only referring to modern PCs, with massively complex memory space and interfaces (how many different buses are hooked to a modern PC? 9? 10?) but on an embedded system, in general, coding in userspace and coding in kernelspace isn't that different."
What is incorrect or naive? Did I mention embedded?
"The better point is what the hell is the difference between writing a device driver that sits inside an OS, and writing a portion of an OS that improves its performance? Or is SCO claiming that all device drivers belong to them as well?"
I think since SCO is dead as far as development goes, they want any code that in any way needs touches, uses or depends on their "IP" to be considered theirs. I guess to them is is like they own a chocolat chip cookie recipe and claim that your daughters, daughters, daughters
chocolate chip - walnut - raisin - mustard seed cookies are derived and hence theirs.
Ummm, you have no clue what your talking about. Low-level coding for an OS is nothing like coding a regular user-land app. In userland you don't have to worry about interrupts, you almost always have high level apis. If your app crashes on a modern os it is isolated in its own memory space and usually doesn't affect the system. You crash kernel code and every thing goes down. In a kernel there are no high level apis, there is no standard c library. Every thing has to be written from scratch. There is no printf, System.out.prinln, no threading libs, network libs, etc. Portability at userland is also far easier then in kernel-land. Almost no user-land apps need to deal with assembly and writing code to specific archs besides word size or endienness. Now go back to your vb/asp scripting : )
I think most people here miss the point. The riaa is crying because people are taking back what really belongs to them. How does it belong to us? Well, in the USA copyright is actually an agreement between we the people and the copyright holder. Our part of the bargin is that we agree to give them a limited monopoly on the copyright. Their end is that when that limited monopoly expires, the copyrighted work passes into the public domain. A producer of a work does not have to agree to this. They can license their work however they want and keep if for as long as they want. However, once a producer of a work enters into this agreement, they are expected to be bound by this agreement. Over the last twenty years or so, dirtbag middle men like the riaa/mpaa have bought the congressional prostitutes and gotten the copyrights extended. So we the people are expected to uphold our end of the bargain and give them their limited monopolies while they are able to buy their way out of their end? This just isn't flying with the people and thus we have this huge backlash such as p2p. If the riaa/mpaa and government want this type of reaction to stop, then copyright law would change and go back to how our founding fathers made it with a 14-20 year copyright. However, if greedy politicians continue to sell their sole and their votes while dirtbag middle men like the riaa/mpaa continue to screw us over, then we will continue to strike back. While I am am not into p2p, I don't think there is anything wrong with it since the riaa/mpaa have not upheld their end of the copyright bargain, and IMO, have forfeit the deal.
If I were to walk into an art gallery, would I be expected to purchase a work of art blind-folded? No, I would be allowed to sample the art, paintings, sculptures, etc BEFORE I made my decision. This is the same for just about all things we purchase. Why are we expected to buy a whole alblum for the only song we have heard an liked? The reason is that the RIAA can suck up more money. Charge you for 10 songs when you only want one or two. There have been very few cd's I have heard in which I have liked all the songs. This is just another way for the RIAA to extort more money out of the people. The people are speaking back and saying we are not going to pay for things we do not want to support your afluent life style. What has been the solution? P2P. Just about any other industry would have listened to the people and given them what they want. We have built the networks, protocols and software and shown them the business model WE want. How much bigger of a hint does the riaa want? We are handing them a very successful business model guaranteed to succeed, and those old crusty dinosaurs are tossing it out and trying to say they will only do business their way. This is not how an industry should function IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux server sales for the fourth quarter 2003, up 90 percent. By contrast, overall U.S. server revenue climbed just 5 percent in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier.
75 percent of IBM's blade servers shipments run Linux.
Fourth quarter 2003 Linux server increases over fourth quarter of the pervious year: IBM Linux sales up +112%
HP Linux sales up +81%
Dell Linux sales up +66%
This is just in the US, things are even better outside of the USA. Before you spread FUD, get your facts straight.
That is because of a monopoly that refuses to use standards. Has undocumented API's, proprietary document formats, propreitary protocols. They take a standard and "embrace and extend" it and push it out to their 90%+ desktop market and have just made a new standard that no one else can participate in. Do it the MS way or get lost. Sorry, I have morals and I believe that our society can do better and put human advancemnet before monitary gain. I boycott products and companies that I feel are unethical. There are many people that bitch and moan, yet they do not take action. I have been using Linux for about 5 years and exclusively for 2 1/2 years. When I switched exclusively to Linux, it was a little rocky. However, once I learned the OS and how to find help and help myself, there was not any single task I could not do.
Oh, and do you really think all the hardware support under ms windows has anything to do with ms windows? No. It is the hardware manufactuers that make all those drivers, not Microsoft. If you use Linux and some hardware is not supported, then complain to the manufactuer and use your money to get the support you need to make the choices you want. When I bought a digital camera, I found a manufactuer that uses a standard usb mass-storage and then supported them for making that decision with my money. The camera works perfectly under Linux. I have a ton of hardware for my systems at home. All the hardware works great with Linux becuase I did a little research before I purchased and then I support manufactuers for support Linux with my money and also by explicitly thanking them for supporting Linux and letting them know that the one of the main reasons I chose them was becuase of that Linux suppport.
There are too many lazy people out there that want to complain and yet take no action. If more people were to take action then support for Linux across the board would grow by leaps -n- bounds.
Sorry, MS did NOT invent cleartype. It was around apple for a long time.
The Microsoft "Hall of Innovation"
Have you tried Redhat 9? The fonts using XFree86 4.3.x with Xfont look much better on my laptop then they did with MS Windows XP and clear type. Whit cleartype there was too colour fringing.
**Linux has a long way to go for smooth MultiMedia usage.
What are you talking about? I have been able to play any DVD I have tried with Linux using MPlayer or Xine. I have been able to play any multimedia I have wanted with MPlayer. I can listen to ogg, mp3, etc. I can watch MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 with no problems. Didn't you just read how the animated film Sinbad was made entirely with Linux? I wonder how they could make a feature length animation using Linux with its poor multimedia support? I wonder how others have been able to use Linux on other films like LOTR, Scooby Doo, and others? Yes the multimedia is just crappy. I wonder how I can use my digital camera without problems? I wonder how I can use pendrives, media readers, tv cards etc with Linux. Hmmm.
**Wow, look at all the evidence you back this up with. Sure, I don't use Hotmail or Passport 'cause I don't need to, but IIS? Have you used the one in Server 2003 or are you just going off of the Code Red scare?
Umm, sorry. IIS in 2003 has not been out nearly long enough to say anything about its merits let alone its security or lack therof. Come back in a year or two when all the crackers have had their fun. One big problem with a rewrite is that you lose all those bug fixes and security fixes.
**If they were separate programs, it would be harder to work together and actually less secure because they would be in separate process spaces so allowing only the calendar to talk to email and not other stuff is harder to do. How about you offer some valid reasons why they should be separate programs?
Again, your are way off. How are programs running in a seperate process space insecure? You want programs in a seperate process space to create security and stablity between two different applications. The way programs have been desinged to interact is by using something called a standard. This is how all these servers can talk to one another, how you can browse the web and do many more things. MS has standards that they use for their own programs. Though they are just a greedy monopoly and do not believe in sharing or encouraging standards compliance. They want to keep their "standards" proprietary and call them "trade secrets" or "IP". What if every other programmer or corporation took this same approach? We would not have servers that could talk over tcp/ip, the internet, etc because everyone would be doing their own thing like MS.
**So you don't like a couple of their programs (such as IE). Use something else and be happy!
Again, with MS practices, it is very difficult to exercise free choice. You have to fight against "integrated" products, closed protocols, closed document formats, etc. MS does not want any user or corporation to have choice and they have continually shown that. If they cared about their customers having the ability to make a choice, then they would work with standards compliant technologies. If they want to "extened" a techonology, they would share that back with the IT world and have the extensions become part of the standard intstead of hoarding it.
What I find sad is just how effective the MS FUD and marketing machine really is. You seem to actually believe the stuff that you are spewing. No corporatioin becomes an monopoly by caring about choice, standards or customers. They get there by unethical business practices.
For extra credit, a perceptive student may see the one limitation of the find_factors function. : )
This code is copyright (c)2003 SCO Corp.
The thing is many people think the purpose of Linux is to "beat" MS windows. While I think that it will surpass MS in the server area, the desktop may or may not happen, or it may take a number of years for the desktop. But the most important point is that Linux will ALWAYS be around and it is not a competitor of any OS. It is a movement "By the Poeople and For the People". So whether it "beats" MS and takes 90% of the desktop and or server market does not matter. There will always be plenty of developers working on it commercially, academically and non-commercially.
There is currently too much commercial money in Linux from many different players for it to just "go away". Also, MS's typical tactics that they use to "beat" the competition won't work on Linux. Price cuts may keep some from switching, however many that want to switch do it not just because of cost, but also choice. People and companies are tired of the MS slogan of give them the razors and sell them the blades. Most people are not dumb enough to buy into getting heavy discounts from MS. Because they all know that MS will try to make it back some other way once they are locked in. Many people and companies are also tired of the anti-competitve tactics and their freedom of choice being taken away. When you build your infrastructure on MS, then all those app you use are designed to function "best" when you ONLY use other MS stuff. I personally think that MS's goal is to be the ONE developer of all software. Sure, some of the small meaningless shareware type stuff will still float around. But for any of the bigger apps, protocols and codecs, MS wants to hoarde that and be the only controller. It kind of reminds me of a "One Ring to Rule Them All" type of deal.
It is probably because my laptop has mostly Intel stuff:
Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset Host Bridge (rev 4).
PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 4).
VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW (rev 0).
The Mobility works fine with the DRI Radeon driver and I get about 792 FPS from glxgears which sucks compared to my NVidia GF3 Ti500 but it plays Linux RTCW fine. Without the Intel 845 (Brookdale) Chipset AGP, it probabaly would not work.
Run this command from a terminal: /etc/X11/XF86Config.
glxinfo | grep 'direct rendering:'
If you don't get a "Yes" then you do not have accelerated 3D going. I think that the radeon driver needs to use 16Bit mode which you can set to the defalut in your
Umm, you don't need to do any of this with the RPM's. Just rpm -ivh NVidia.foo.rpm. Or you you have the src rpm, rpmbuild --rebuild NVidia-src.rpm and then install the new rpm under /usr/src/redhat/RPM/foo.rpm.
Oh, also email NVidia, info at nvidia dot com and thank them for their continued Linux support.
Not with NVidia. Take a look here:
Nvidia Linux
They support Linux IA32, Linux AMD64, Linux IA64 and FreeBSD. They support their chipsets, etc. I also think a good portion of Intel's stuff is "offcically" supported under Linux like their graphics chips and audio. And even if they do not release a driver, they provide the specs which is more usefull to Linux then a proprietry driver in most cases.
The DRI supports ATI cards with 2D and some 3D. On my laptop I have an Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500] that works well with DRI. I was playing the Linux version of RTCW last night. However there are a few "proprietary" features that the DRI does not support because ATI does not release the specs. The NVidia cards on the other hand, have a common driver core. So any feature under the ms-windows driver will be present under the Linux driver. While I prefer open source, I don't mind if a manufactuer releases closed source drivers such as NVidia if they are of good quality. The NVidia drivers are just great IMO and I will only purchase from them in the future.
Go here ATI service and tell them how they suck for dropping their Linux support. Also mention how from now on you will only use NVidia products.
Actually it is really easy to have the ms windows boot loader boot Linux. Well I think it only works for NT/2k/xp. All you do is install grub or lilo on the partition that Linux is on and then copy the first 512 bytes of that partition to a floppy. Boot into winders and copy that file to your C:\ drive and modify C:\boot.ini
Booting Linux from the NT Boot Menu
Doesn't the Xbox have an NVidia card? If so, NVidia fully supports their cards under Linux with ALL the functionality that the ms windows drivers have since they use a common code base.
In most places it is legal to reverse engineer things for compatibility and/or personal use. So they did not break any laws there.
Next, they are not using a derivitive work. They are not using MS source code and then basing code on that. They have a method to modify personal property to allow compatibility with other software, again perfectly legal in most places and there is no derivation involved.
Look at software like samba. It is widely used and was developed by reverse engineering the MS smb protocol. MS can't stop it since it is not a crime to reverse engineer for compatibility.
"Isolated memory spaces, interrupt handling, etc. - those exist only in kernel space only if that's the only place where you want it, not because there's some compsci-theoretical reason that it "has" to be there. Embedded systems regularly have a poorly defined difference between "kernel mode" and "user mode". On x86 systems, it's clear because the system is usually set up to not be able to execute certain instructions unless it's in supervisory (ring 0) mode. On other systems, it's not necessarily true."
Well I was not refering to embedded systems which are a whole different game from a "normal" OS. Would you want to switch between kernel land and user land for each interrupt in a "normal" OS kernel?
"The library lack is also pointless if you're doing low level coding (yah... lacking printf might suck, but it's always nice knowing where the UART registers are!) where you honestly couldn't give a rat's ass about stdlib functions."
Again, look at the Linux kernel, many things are re-implemented like printk, linked lists etc.
"Your point is (somewhat) correct, if a bit naive, if only referring to modern PCs, with massively complex memory space and interfaces (how many different buses are hooked to a modern PC? 9? 10?) but on an embedded system, in general, coding in userspace and coding in kernelspace isn't that different."
What is incorrect or naive? Did I mention embedded?
"The better point is what the hell is the difference between writing a device driver that sits inside an OS, and writing a portion of an OS that improves its performance? Or is SCO claiming that all device drivers belong to them as well?"
I think since SCO is dead as far as development goes, they want any code that in any way needs touches, uses or depends on their "IP" to be considered theirs. I guess to them is is like they own a chocolat chip cookie recipe and claim that your daughters, daughters, daughters chocolate chip - walnut - raisin - mustard seed cookies are derived and hence theirs.
Yes, I see the point you were trying to make and sorry for the flame : )
Ummm, you have no clue what your talking about. Low-level coding for an OS is nothing like coding a regular user-land app. In userland you don't have to worry about interrupts, you almost always have high level apis. If your app crashes on a modern os it is isolated in its own memory space and usually doesn't affect the system. You crash kernel code and every thing goes down. In a kernel there are no high level apis, there is no standard c library. Every thing has to be written from scratch. There is no printf, System.out.prinln, no threading libs, network libs, etc. Portability at userland is also far easier then in kernel-land. Almost no user-land apps need to deal with assembly and writing code to specific archs besides word size or endienness. Now go back to your vb/asp scripting : )
I meant:
The riaa is crying because people are taking back what really belongs to us
I think most people here miss the point. The riaa is crying because people are taking back what really belongs to them. How does it belong to us? Well, in the USA copyright is actually an agreement between we the people and the copyright holder. Our part of the bargin is that we agree to give them a limited monopoly on the copyright. Their end is that when that limited monopoly expires, the copyrighted work passes into the public domain. A producer of a work does not have to agree to this. They can license their work however they want and keep if for as long as they want. However, once a producer of a work enters into this agreement, they are expected to be bound by this agreement. Over the last twenty years or so, dirtbag middle men like the riaa/mpaa have bought the congressional prostitutes and gotten the copyrights extended. So we the people are expected to uphold our end of the bargain and give them their limited monopolies while they are able to buy their way out of their end? This just isn't flying with the people and thus we have this huge backlash such as p2p. If the riaa/mpaa and government want this type of reaction to stop, then copyright law would change and go back to how our founding fathers made it with a 14-20 year copyright. However, if greedy politicians continue to sell their sole and their votes while dirtbag middle men like the riaa/mpaa continue to screw us over, then we will continue to strike back. While I am am not into p2p, I don't think there is anything wrong with it since the riaa/mpaa have not upheld their end of the copyright bargain, and IMO, have forfeit the deal.
If I were to walk into an art gallery, would I be expected to purchase a work of art blind-folded? No, I would be allowed to sample the art, paintings, sculptures, etc BEFORE I made my decision. This is the same for just about all things we purchase. Why are we expected to buy a whole alblum for the only song we have heard an liked? The reason is that the RIAA can suck up more money. Charge you for 10 songs when you only want one or two. There have been very few cd's I have heard in which I have liked all the songs. This is just another way for the RIAA to extort more money out of the people. The people are speaking back and saying we are not going to pay for things we do not want to support your afluent life style. What has been the solution? P2P. Just about any other industry would have listened to the people and given them what they want. We have built the networks, protocols and software and shown them the business model WE want. How much bigger of a hint does the riaa want? We are handing them a very successful business model guaranteed to succeed, and those old crusty dinosaurs are tossing it out and trying to say they will only do business their way. This is not how an industry should function IMO.