While ULTra can be deployed more easily for demonstrations, for city-wide deployment, Personal Rapid Transit, a wheel based monorail, seems better: it requires much less space on the ground and is probably overall cheaper. For more info, see CPRT and U. Washington.
I dragged in MS because the article I was responding to implicitly compared open source software with "professionally developed" software. Microsoft is simply the most prominent example of such software (in the sense of "professional" as "being done as a livelihood", not as in "being done with skill and experience").
There are two platforms that are nearly identical: Java and C#/.NET. They are well adapted to industry needs and are likely to take over from the current two industry darlings: C and C++ (with a little bit of VB thrown in). C#/.NET actually even makes provisions for linking in C++ code The move from C/C++ to Java/C# is good. Applications programmers should have done that long ago: languages like C/C++ simply aren't well suited to the uses they are being today--high performance, component based software development.easily.
Beyond that, little has changed in terms of choice. If you don't want to go with the industry standard, you can still program in Lisp, Smalltalk, SML, Ada, Objective-C, or whatever else you fancy.
Even someone as dense as Valenti can figure out that computers can't reliably "react to signals embedded in movies". What exactly is supposed to do the reacting? The monitor? The network card? The proprietary, closed source operating system? Who is going to be supposed to develop software for this? Does he want to transform the computer industry from something relatively open with hundreds of vendors to a collection of Sony Playstations, with little hardware documentation? Maybe Sony would go along with that, but I can't see Microsoft doing that, no matter how much Microsoft may hate non-MS operating systems.
What they probably really want is more money, just like they already get a tax on blank media. Maybe a tax on Internet bandwidth, going to the movie industry, or a tax on PCs.
2.4.18 with rc4 applied seems to be a stable, well-tested kernel that has gone through all the testing needed for a release. It deserves its own kernel version number. Since 2.4.18 is not-quite-right, why not just make what was going to be 2.4.18 into 2.4.19?
Wow. Now that's professionalism, eh? Good thing that this whole Open Source badge makes it all okay.
No. What makes it OK is that the fix is out within 24 hours, that even 2.4.18-rc3 is very usable, and that people who run anything on Linux shouldn't be upgrading to a kernel that has just been released, even in the "stable" series.
Microsoft, just to pick one commercial example, releases a new version of Windows once every few years, and major service packs fairly infrequently. They also invest hundreds of millions of dollars in each release. And, you pay hundreds of dollars for Microsoft's software. That's what makes it not OK when Microsoft breaks a kernel release and users end up being stuck with it for months. And Microsoft releases packages with major flaws constantly, much bigger flaws than a forgotten rc4 patch.
I find it hard to see what kind of useful contribution Microsoft can make to this venture. Most of the large-scale networking infrastructure doesn't run on Microsoft platforms and doesn't use Microsoft software. Granted, Microsoft runs some large web sites, but that doesn't really seem a useful qualification. Any ideas?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it looks to me like these are remixes that haven't been authorized by the copyright holders. I can't imagine that a media behemoth that does both music and video games, like Sony, is going to let this go on. Maybe they like the fact that fans are preparing the market, but once it starts making money, I bet they will send out their lawyers and want the market for themselves.
This is kind of like the missile shield: try to make unnecessary, hugely expensive and profitable technology part of some big government program.
Increasing the gas tax is much more sensible. Not only do we already have the technology to collect it (and it's cheap), it actually discourages gas guzzlers, too.
Sorry, that stuff works in the movies. If it were really true, lots of people would move there and could have a comfortable retirement.
The reality is that there is a reason those countries are cheap: poor infrastructure, corruption, lack of security, social problems, etc. As a foreigner to the culture, you will have a hard time integrating and making friends. And, if you are perceived to be a rich foreigner and your legal status is open to some question, the blackmail and demands for more bribes probably won't stop until you run out of money.
That may be technically correct. However, KDE is based on Qt. Can you give any examples of GUI components written using KParts that don't use Qt? Is there an infrastructure for writing KParts components using Gtk+? Because if there isn't (as I believe there isn't), the distinction is academic.
I don't see much point in defrauding people for $250k and disappearing. That's not enough money to retire on comfortably, but it is enough money to make the guy a wanted man, and it will make it pretty tricky for him to hold a normal job.
IBM is doing well. And I think IBM has smart customers who can figure out whether buying a machine for several million dollars running virtualized Linux makes sense or not.
Sun should rather worry about their own licensing issues and their own problems with open source. Java's broken community licensing program and Sun's inability to evolve the platform more quickly has basically killed Java for open source applications (that's why Mono is being written around.NET, even though.NET is much less mature and comes from Microsoft). Sun keeps equivocating on Solaris, Linux, and which one is better in their not-so-humble opinion.
Sun should address their own issues before putting down IBM. I'm sure ten years from now, IBM is still going to be around. I'm not so sure I believe the same thing about Sun.
no single component technology has claimed victory yet for Linux, just thought this might be an interesting read for some
And no single component technology will "claim victory". Different applications have different needs. For some applications, CORBA interoperability is absolute essential.
KParts in particular is further held back by the fact that it is covered by the GPL: commecial developers do not like being nickled-and-dimed just to put their software on Linux, in particular since the industry standard is free. And KParts is (at least perceived to be) biased towards C++.
It's nice what the people over at KDE are doing. But don't expect world domination.
All these "component architectures" are really mostly driven by limitations of C and C++ anyway. In the long run, the issue of component architectures will largely go away, as desktop software development shifts to Java and C#. Yes, Java and C# still require some conventions for components, but they already have most of the hard parts implemented as part of the language.
You are repeating my point: the only way the license makes any difference if Intel tries to engage in some complex game of deception, and that seems just absurd.
Yes, there are lots of for-pay sites. Yes, they probably make up a larger proportion of the net. But, in absolute numbers, there are probably more free and interesting sites than ever before.
Let sites like NYT or Disney charge; who cares--you don't have to go there.
Intel could only pull this off for code they themselves contribute (if someone else uses their patented inventions, that's not Intel's responsibility), and that's the only code you'd have to rewrite. Therefore, you'd only have to replace Intel's contribute code, and you'd be no worse off than if you had written the stuff yourself from scrach. In fact, I think you'd be better off since a working module helps a lot during development, even if you have to reimplement it later.
Yes, software patents can kill free software. That's a real, dangerous, ever-present possibility. However, that has nothing to do with how Gnome or Mono are licensed. If Intel has patents that cover technology implemented in Gnome or Mono, they can threaten or possibly kill the projects with those patents.
The only time anything changes with respect to Intel and patents is if Intel explicitly signs their rights away. I believe that if you distribute your software under a GNU license, that means you give others the right to use your patented invention. That's a nice safeguard, to be sure, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to protect Mono or Gnome from Intel.
If Intel were duplicitous enough to contribute a patented invention under an X11-style copyright and then, two years later, turn around, mention that they have a patent, and sue for infringement, Mono and Gnome might have to stop using that part of the software, but I seriously doubt any judge would award damages. And the affected parts of the software could be easily replaced, since patents are not like copyrights or trade secrets--there is no risk of "contamination".
Altogether, the article strikes me as being as the grumblings of someone who is just overly zealous about GNU-style licenses. Yes, GNU-style licenses are nice, but the sky isn't falling if something is distributed under some other license. The X11 license is perfectly fine for open source software and has been used for many projects (including X11 itself) that are a much more dangerous minefield of patents than a 1970's style object oriented language.
Linux is a mature, proven solution for clustering. Linux easier to install and easier to maintain than Windows. Linux is more efficient. Linux supports remote logins. Linux supports distributed administration, unattented installs, and automatic upgrades. Linux has automatic process migration. Linux is what all the high-end scientific software runs on. And Linux is much cheaper.
So, why in heaven's name would anyone want to run Windows for clustering? Oh, I can think of one reason: Microsoft may give you a big bundle of money, like it did to these people, but other than "buddy, the first one's on me", they just don't have a point, or a product. The only area where Microsoft is somewhat credible is on the desktop; their product isn't great, but it's usable. For server applications, they are simply not competitive.
Well, of course, in a certain sense it it: you can talk about a lot more in the US than in China. In the US, you insult politicians, criticize the government, tell people how to cheat on their taxes, and make fun of anybody and everybody. All that is good.
But the US happens to have its own obsessions of what is permissible. US obsessions are about disparaging foods, certain kinds of pornography, cryptography, and anything that might step on the toes of big media companies. And in the US, the means of enforcing those restrictions are oddball restrictions on any kind of hardware that plays audio and video, throwing people in jail, sending FBI agents to foreign countries to "help" them, trade sanctions, and prohibiting certain goods from being imported.
Yes, China has different obsessions (although there seems to be some overlap with US obsessions). But both governments are throwing their considerable weight around to prohibit access from the kind of content they consider harmful. When the US abandons restrictions like the DMCA, software patents, baroque rules on pornography, and the various export restrictions on cryptography, the US position on criticizing China would get a lot stronger. Until then, one can only conclude that both countries have haphazard and serious restrictions on speech.
The ROX desktop seems much closer to the Macintosh philosophy than other desktops. On the Mac, too, much of the interaction with the system is through a single paradigm built around the file system. This, to me, is a far more promising direction for a usable Linux desktop than complex megaprojects like KDE or Gnome.
The amounts of sleep were self-reported. People notoriously underestimate the amount of sleep they get.
Any correlation doesn't tell you anything about causation. Sleeping a lot may be a consequence of a pre-existing medical condition, not a cause of death.
The sample population isn't randomly selected.
I suspect that the subjects in the study underreported the amount of sleep they got by about 1h. I also suspect that the people who slept unusually much in the study probably already had a medical condition that then later killed them.
Instead of Mozilla, use Galeon. It uses the Mozilla rendering and JavaScript engines, but the UI is written in Gtk+ and it's a whole lot faster overall.
Macintosh is a brand, a style, and an integrated hardware/software system. Apple hasn't magically solved problems of system configuration or usability, they have side-stepped them. Apple's systems are easy to configure and install because the choice is limited. And Apple's systems appeal to their user community because Apple has picked a particular segment of the market that they sell to.
You can't scale up Apple's model to 95% of the market, or even 50% of the market, and hundreds of hardware manufacturers. If you try, you end up with the same configuration problems as Windows or Linux have, and you end up with the same complaints about usability that people have about Windows and Linux. A single company can't be everything to everybody.
What we need is not one Microsoft that has 50% of the market and one Apple that has 50% of the market, what we need is 20 companies and efforts like Microsoft, Apple, Linux, BeOS, etc., each of which caters to the needs of 5% of the market.
Slashdot Mirror
While ULTra can be deployed more easily for demonstrations, for city-wide deployment, Personal Rapid Transit, a wheel based monorail, seems better: it requires much less space on the ground and is probably overall cheaper. For more info, see CPRT and U. Washington.
I dragged in MS because the article I was responding to implicitly compared open source software with "professionally developed" software. Microsoft is simply the most prominent example of such software (in the sense of "professional" as "being done as a livelihood", not as in "being done with skill and experience").
Beyond that, little has changed in terms of choice. If you don't want to go with the industry standard, you can still program in Lisp, Smalltalk, SML, Ada, Objective-C, or whatever else you fancy.
What they probably really want is more money, just like they already get a tax on blank media. Maybe a tax on Internet bandwidth, going to the movie industry, or a tax on PCs.
2.4.18 with rc4 applied seems to be a stable, well-tested kernel that has gone through all the testing needed for a release. It deserves its own kernel version number. Since 2.4.18 is not-quite-right, why not just make what was going to be 2.4.18 into 2.4.19?
No. What makes it OK is that the fix is out within 24 hours, that even 2.4.18-rc3 is very usable, and that people who run anything on Linux shouldn't be upgrading to a kernel that has just been released, even in the "stable" series.
Microsoft, just to pick one commercial example, releases a new version of Windows once every few years, and major service packs fairly infrequently. They also invest hundreds of millions of dollars in each release. And, you pay hundreds of dollars for Microsoft's software. That's what makes it not OK when Microsoft breaks a kernel release and users end up being stuck with it for months. And Microsoft releases packages with major flaws constantly, much bigger flaws than a forgotten rc4 patch.
I find it hard to see what kind of useful contribution Microsoft can make to this venture. Most of the large-scale networking infrastructure doesn't run on Microsoft platforms and doesn't use Microsoft software. Granted, Microsoft runs some large web sites, but that doesn't really seem a useful qualification. Any ideas?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it looks to me like these are remixes that haven't been authorized by the copyright holders. I can't imagine that a media behemoth that does both music and video games, like Sony, is going to let this go on. Maybe they like the fact that fans are preparing the market, but once it starts making money, I bet they will send out their lawyers and want the market for themselves.
Increasing the gas tax is much more sensible. Not only do we already have the technology to collect it (and it's cheap), it actually discourages gas guzzlers, too.
The reality is that there is a reason those countries are cheap: poor infrastructure, corruption, lack of security, social problems, etc. As a foreigner to the culture, you will have a hard time integrating and making friends. And, if you are perceived to be a rich foreigner and your legal status is open to some question, the blackmail and demands for more bribes probably won't stop until you run out of money.
That may be technically correct. However, KDE is based on Qt. Can you give any examples of GUI components written using KParts that don't use Qt? Is there an infrastructure for writing KParts components using Gtk+? Because if there isn't (as I believe there isn't), the distinction is academic.
I don't see much point in defrauding people for $250k and disappearing. That's not enough money to retire on comfortably, but it is enough money to make the guy a wanted man, and it will make it pretty tricky for him to hold a normal job.
Sun should rather worry about their own licensing issues and their own problems with open source. Java's broken community licensing program and Sun's inability to evolve the platform more quickly has basically killed Java for open source applications (that's why Mono is being written around .NET, even though .NET is much less mature and comes from Microsoft). Sun keeps equivocating on Solaris, Linux, and which one is better in their not-so-humble opinion.
Sun should address their own issues before putting down IBM. I'm sure ten years from now, IBM is still going to be around. I'm not so sure I believe the same thing about Sun.
And no single component technology will "claim victory". Different applications have different needs. For some applications, CORBA interoperability is absolute essential.
KParts in particular is further held back by the fact that it is covered by the GPL: commecial developers do not like being nickled-and-dimed just to put their software on Linux, in particular since the industry standard is free. And KParts is (at least perceived to be) biased towards C++.
It's nice what the people over at KDE are doing. But don't expect world domination.
All these "component architectures" are really mostly driven by limitations of C and C++ anyway. In the long run, the issue of component architectures will largely go away, as desktop software development shifts to Java and C#. Yes, Java and C# still require some conventions for components, but they already have most of the hard parts implemented as part of the language.
You are repeating my point: the only way the license makes any difference if Intel tries to engage in some complex game of deception, and that seems just absurd.
Let sites like NYT or Disney charge; who cares--you don't have to go there.
Intel could only pull this off for code they themselves contribute (if someone else uses their patented inventions, that's not Intel's responsibility), and that's the only code you'd have to rewrite. Therefore, you'd only have to replace Intel's contribute code, and you'd be no worse off than if you had written the stuff yourself from scrach. In fact, I think you'd be better off since a working module helps a lot during development, even if you have to reimplement it later.
The only time anything changes with respect to Intel and patents is if Intel explicitly signs their rights away. I believe that if you distribute your software under a GNU license, that means you give others the right to use your patented invention. That's a nice safeguard, to be sure, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to protect Mono or Gnome from Intel.
If Intel were duplicitous enough to contribute a patented invention under an X11-style copyright and then, two years later, turn around, mention that they have a patent, and sue for infringement, Mono and Gnome might have to stop using that part of the software, but I seriously doubt any judge would award damages. And the affected parts of the software could be easily replaced, since patents are not like copyrights or trade secrets--there is no risk of "contamination".
Altogether, the article strikes me as being as the grumblings of someone who is just overly zealous about GNU-style licenses. Yes, GNU-style licenses are nice, but the sky isn't falling if something is distributed under some other license. The X11 license is perfectly fine for open source software and has been used for many projects (including X11 itself) that are a much more dangerous minefield of patents than a 1970's style object oriented language.
So, why in heaven's name would anyone want to run Windows for clustering? Oh, I can think of one reason: Microsoft may give you a big bundle of money, like it did to these people, but other than "buddy, the first one's on me", they just don't have a point, or a product. The only area where Microsoft is somewhat credible is on the desktop; their product isn't great, but it's usable. For server applications, they are simply not competitive.
The old iMacs are quiet (don't know about the new ones) and pretty compact.
But the US happens to have its own obsessions of what is permissible. US obsessions are about disparaging foods, certain kinds of pornography, cryptography, and anything that might step on the toes of big media companies. And in the US, the means of enforcing those restrictions are oddball restrictions on any kind of hardware that plays audio and video, throwing people in jail, sending FBI agents to foreign countries to "help" them, trade sanctions, and prohibiting certain goods from being imported.
Yes, China has different obsessions (although there seems to be some overlap with US obsessions). But both governments are throwing their considerable weight around to prohibit access from the kind of content they consider harmful. When the US abandons restrictions like the DMCA, software patents, baroque rules on pornography, and the various export restrictions on cryptography, the US position on criticizing China would get a lot stronger. Until then, one can only conclude that both countries have haphazard and serious restrictions on speech.
The ROX desktop seems much closer to the Macintosh philosophy than other desktops. On the Mac, too, much of the interaction with the system is through a single paradigm built around the file system. This, to me, is a far more promising direction for a usable Linux desktop than complex megaprojects like KDE or Gnome.
I suspect that the subjects in the study underreported the amount of sleep they got by about 1h. I also suspect that the people who slept unusually much in the study probably already had a medical condition that then later killed them.
Instead of Mozilla, use Galeon. It uses the Mozilla rendering and JavaScript engines, but the UI is written in Gtk+ and it's a whole lot faster overall.
You can't scale up Apple's model to 95% of the market, or even 50% of the market, and hundreds of hardware manufacturers. If you try, you end up with the same configuration problems as Windows or Linux have, and you end up with the same complaints about usability that people have about Windows and Linux. A single company can't be everything to everybody.
What we need is not one Microsoft that has 50% of the market and one Apple that has 50% of the market, what we need is 20 companies and efforts like Microsoft, Apple, Linux, BeOS, etc., each of which caters to the needs of 5% of the market.