And the funny part is that DOS was a sideline for *Microsoft*. Rumor has it (and I've heard it from a number of people inside IBM in a position to know) that Microsoft was paid a mere $5 for every copy of MS-DOS they sold to IBM.
Why? In exchange for providing the operating system for IBM's PC for such a very low price (especially as the expected # of machines was 250k or so), IBM included Microsoft Cassette BASIC in ROM on every IBM PC. And, in fact, every IBM PC, PC/jr, PC/convertible, PC/XT, PC/AT and PS/2 (and...) has Microsoft Cassette BASIC in ROM! Power it up without a hard drive or floppy and get the power of BASIC!
Weird that so much would depend on Bill Gates desire to own the BASIC-in-ROM marketplace...
Yes, moron, that's exactly why they did it (except the changes weren't just 'stylistic', but bugfixes, and other enhancements as well). They also offer all changes back to Debian. They aren't trying to lock you into Ubuntu.
You truly do not understand how Linux works, nor do you seem willing to question your social-darwinistic view of business.
No. It has nothing to do with understanding business. It has everything to do with the ORIGINAL POINT OF THIS THREAD! The point is, free or non-free, different products from different vendors tend to be different. Period.
The whole *point* of this entire discussion is that LSB has been poorly supported. My point was, why would anyone expect differently? 30 years of UNIX has shown us that such efforts are extremely difficult. Why would Linux be magically different?
You keep trying to say that the magic of Linux will overcome 30 years of recorded history. Yet you then keep coming up with counter-examples: the fact that not one but two major distributions sprung up as incompatible modifications of the original parent, and that the most significant non-commercial distribution now has a popular offshoot that is now generating packages that are incompatible with the parent.
Why, again, is Linux going to magically overcome not only 30 years of history, but 5 years of their own actions? This is not just my darwinian view. This is actual reality. Again: why are they going to do it in the future, when they haven't done it in the past?
So are you saying commercial UNIX vendors are playing the same game as the Linux distro makers? The differences from UNIX to UNIX are far greater than the differences from Linux to Linux. I also find it hard to believe that RedHat and SuSE are trying to come up with ways to more or less 'lock in' their users. What they're trying to do, which does run counter to the LSB, although not for the reasons you describe, is make their distro just that much better than the next--to give it that "RedHat" style (and the "Debian" style, the "Mandrake/Mandriva" style, etc).
Do you think that IBM (or Sun, or...) would say, "Yeah, we're trying to lock in customers with AIX (or Solaris or...)"? Or do you think they just might say exactly what you said: "We're just trying to make AIX just that much better, but unfortunately, it's just a little bit different than Solaris..." Why is one lock-in and the other isn't? You can't have it both ways.
In short, you're wrong that corporate "screw you-ness" is the main reason holding back the LSB, but more of the fact that the LSB, at least on the outset, will shackle innovation--each distro maker has their own way of doing things, and many of these "ways" aren't random, but deliberate choices about how things should be done. The open (and egalitarian) nature of Linux encourages this. Eventually, though, expect the LSB to become more standard. User demand will always trump developer laziness in FS/OSS in the long run, especially since the developers are also the users, and vice versa.
I see. IBM and Sun are evil companies who set out to screw their customers by locking them in, but Red Hat and Novell are egalitarian companies unmotivated by profit and just trying to innovate? IBM and Sun completely ignored their users and fragmented the UNIX marketplace for no technical reasons, purely motivated by greed and a desire to screw the users, while Red Hat and Novell will listen to their users and happily hold hands and sing in peace, love and harmony?
Last I checked, IBM and Sun happily sold *millions* of copies of their UNIXes to willing customers. It's not like there weren't alternatives. It's not like there weren't *dozens* of attempts to unite under a common standard. So how was what IBM and Sun did *not* for the users? And why will Red Hat and Novell be able to overcome 30 years of actual *history*? Just because they want to?
You have a (very small) point about Debian/Ubuntu/Gentoo. Given their near total lack of ownership by a corporation, they are more likely to embrace user-driven standards. But the great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from. After all, I'm sure they all use compatible installation packages already, right, because users want that. Right?
Oh, wasn't there an article on/. just a couple of days ago about package incompatibilities between Debian and Ubuntu? Let me guess: Ubuntu was just 'making stylistic changes to make their distribution better'. For the users. Think of the users.
I'm sure that in the egalitarian world we live in that your thoughts are exactly correct and that grassroots efforts always succeed.
Wait: we *don't* live in such a world? Oh.
There has been 30 years of UNIX. In that 30 years, the closest we ever came to that kind of cross-platform standardization is CDE. Do *you* want to use CDE? Me neither.
While the advantage to the *user* might be great in the long run if everyone followed LSB, there is a great deal of disadvantage in the *short run* for companies. And that's why we see little success with LSB.
It's funny: that features has forever affected the way I use the Web. I see so many users loop between two or three pages over and over by using links on the page: page 1 -> page 2 -> page 3 -> page 1
Because of the *awful* history page that would create, I've always been in the habit of backing up, rather than moving forward. I haven't had that feature in a browser in a decade, but I still back up rather than plow forward...:)
That's much more in line like I how I remember it. I was an OS/2 user, and I have *very* fond memories of OS/2, but even I remember WebExplorer as a pretty basic--even rough--browser.
It was very cool that a browser was included at all, but I never remember it as being a great browser. I do remember using it for a while, but for the most part the only thing it ever did was download Netscape for OS/2!
Ironically, that's very similar to the only thing I ever use IE for: downloading Firefox!:)
Religion is based entirely on faith, to the absolute exclusion of reason.
I think that the definition of faith as something you believe without evidence is an extremely poor one. It's a very common one, especially among those who look down upon religion. It's also not what the Bible (my chosen old book...) says faith should be:
Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld.Hebrews 11:1.
Assured expectation and evident demonstration of realities does not expect "blind" faith. Rather, it expects that evidence has been presented to the person, who can use that evidence to extrapolate what will happen in the future.
I am naturally a skeptical person. I do *not* believe just because I have been told to. No one should believe something because they have been told to. Only because they have *proven* it to themselves.
The sad thing is that most religions teach that faith is exactly what you described. As someone who spends a great deal of time talking to others about religion, most people have been told that "God is a mystery" and "You're not supposed to know." Nothing could be further from the truth.
True faith only comes after something is proven to you. It's not what you need to overlook problems. It's what you have because, try as hard as you might, you can't find problems. When you see that something is correct after 10 times, you begin to believe that it'll be right on the 11th time as well. *That* is true faith.
This is the second post mentionin this. I assume you're talking about WebExplorer. I don't remember that browser as being great. In fact, I remember it as being pretty awful. Except for the fact that it was properly multi-threaded and therefore ran smoothly, like most everything else on OS/2, I remember nothing positive from this browser.
I was a *long-time* OS/2 user up until 2001 or so, but I can't remember using WebExplorer voluntarily if there was *any* other browser on the system. Am I forgetting someting? What was so good about this that now two people write about it?!?
Please, please *please* tell me you don't mean IBM WebExplorer. It may have been "pretty neat" *literally* a decade ago, but even Netscape 3.0 was better.
I was a *die-hard* OS/2 user up until 2001 or so, and I just retired my last OS/2 server this year. But even I wouldn't call WebExplorer anything even approaching neat...
So there are no expectations of privacy anywhere but on your own property? What if you live in an apartment? It's not your property? What about in the bathroom of a store? What about if the person across the street has a telephoto lens pointed at your house? These are all A-OK?
If the answer to *any* of these are no, then you would agree that surveilance has limits, even on private property. The people in the article are encouraging others to think about these limits. Their actions taken out of context might be seen as silly. But doesn't the fact that people react so strongly to such obviously silly behiavior hint at the fact that people might have stronger feelings about the entire subject of surveilance if they thought more deeply about it?
As one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and therefore being one of those people who wake you up at 10:00 A.M. on Saturday morning (*not* 6:00 A.M. like people often like to say: even *we* are not crazy to go door-to-door before 9:00 A.M...), I find this thought fascinating as well.
I am one for whom causing people to think about their religious beliefs (myself definitely included) is as relevant as getting people to think about Linux versus Windows, or the state of patent and copyright law. Sadly, that seems like a pretty small amount on Slashdot.
It *is* interesting to see individuals (many of whom seem to be on Slashdot) who consider "keeping an open mind" an important quality in *everything* other than Religion.
If everyone thought like that, no progress would ever be made. We know that cameras have to exist for certain purposes. But where is the balance between privacy and profit? Are we too far one way or the other? How else are you going to answer these questions without people even thinking about the options?
We all know that there are cameras. But do you think the majority of people give thought to just how *many* cameras there are? Or do you think people think about how much they are giving up, versus how much they are gaining?
Doesn't the fact that there was such a strong reaction to something that is really so pointless (taking pictures of cameras!) demonstrate that there is value in getting people to think about the power of surveilance? I would agree with you if everyone thought that their actions were meaningless, but in fact just the opposite happened: people reacted *strongly* to their actions, the sousveilance. So why shouldn' people react strongly to the surveilance?
You know what? I too agree with you: the idea of taking pictures of cameras is pointless.
But the more I thought about it, the more clever it becomes. It forces people to think about the actions of the cameras based on an action that, in and of itself, is harmless and non-threatening. The fact that people were *threatened* by such a non-threatening, even pointless action should cause them to think long and hard about how they should feel about the impact of the actual surveillance.
So, after futher reflection, I would have to say that their actions are brilliant. Will most people think that deeply about it? Maybe not immediately. But I think that at least *some* people will reflect upon this.
Corrected link: Bering LEAF Firewall. For the record, Bering uClibc is a newer version of Bering: check out that one.
Bering is, AFAIK, x86-only. Of course, it is completely open source, and you could recompile for different targets. However, I do not believe that there are any binary packages for MIPS. I use it with Mini-ITX systems with no moving parts. That's quite a bit more expensive than the Linksys router!:)
There are financial and tax ramifications of holding equipment on the books for extended periods of time, versus leasing. Some companies like the enforced need to keep their equipment current, others like being able to hold onto their equipment until it is beyond recovery.
Like just about every business decision, the answer is a solid "It depends".
They *have* to come with their own wheels. They must have a single I-beam down the middle, they must have a hitch, the hitch must be included in the length measurements (just as the overhang must be counted in the width measurements), etc.
They're titled just like a car (or, more specifically, like a car trailer...). When you buy or sell one, you transfer a title just like transfering a title to a car.
I know all this because I now live in my second mobile home. 1800 ft^2, $40,000 in Rochester, Michigan. I put an offer on a *1200* ft^2 house at $175,000 and was turned down.
People complain that you don't gain equity in a mobile home like you do in a house. That's fine. I take the $1300 a month I would have put into a mortgage on a house significantly smaller, and put it all into an index mutual fund. 10% increase per year: at least as good as what I would have gotten from a home!
Virtualization (CoLinux) is *nice*, but it's not the same as ABI compatibility. For example, hardware support under virtualization is iffy. You need virtualized drivers as well. Now, in many cases, you just have to write a single, generic driver for things such as video, console, network, disk access, etc. But the support also tends to be generic: fancy features may not be supported.
Also, you then have a computer with two completely unrelated environments. There's no integration between them. Whereas things like having different ABI's (i.e. a Posix subsystem and a Win32 subsystem) allows you to use the applications together, rather than using them as two computers with a single KVM...
One of the principles of Extreme Programming is paired programming: two programmers sitting in front of a single computer. This is a chair to "facilitate" this, including being able to elevate the chair to "standing height" for the daily standing meetings, also a part of XP...
I used to use a very similar environment under OS/2. It was very nice.
OS/2 had a package called EMX. EMX was to OS/2 what Cygwin is to Windows. With it, people would compile UNIX apps for OS/2, and they would just require a single DLL, not the entire craziness that Cygwin-compiled apps can be.
This compatibility was so good that all of X Windows could be compiled for OS/2, leading to XFree86OS/2 (some name, eh?). Windows now has the same thing with Cygwin/X, but OS/2 had it back in 1996...
It was really very nice to be able to run the real UNIX versions of things like Bind, Sendmail, IRCd, Apache and other such UNIX daemons. Of course, you could do the same with Linux, but like I said, this was back in the mid-90's. If you think Linux driver support can be bad today, try back then! At least OS/2 had *some* hardware drivers!:)
Even today, a ton of OS/2 software is ported to OS/2 using EMX, at least in the beginning: Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, and other such Linux Open Source projects.
The idea of building a UNIX (or Linux) subsystem for Windows is an *old* one. As TFA mentions, Posix "compatibility" was built into Windows NT from day one. The fact that it's still a steaming pile of cow dung shows how much of a desire there is for it. The Windows people couldn't care less, and the UNIX people would rather swallow swords than use the NT kernel, especially with FreeBSD and Linux out there... Is this doable? Absolutely. Is it worthwhile? People's words to the contrary, there hasn't been a huge groundswell of support...
Simple: evolution is the change in a gene's frequency over time. That I believe in. Does the frequency of a gene change, especially due to its usefulness in a creature's environment? Sure. However, do I believe that things like, oh, say, kidneys all of a sudden appearing into fish in an extraordinarily small number of generations due to a change in gene frequency because of some single or series of mutations? No. To me, intelligent design makes a lot more sense than that.
(I chose kidneys because the kidneys in the evolutionarily oldest fish (sharks) are fully formed and far more complete to reclaim as much water as they can, rather than those of evolutionarily younger fish (freshwater), where the kidney is a crude device that pushes water out as fast as it can.)
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Why? In exchange for providing the operating system for IBM's PC for such a very low price (especially as the expected # of machines was 250k or so), IBM included Microsoft Cassette BASIC in ROM on every IBM PC. And, in fact, every IBM PC, PC/jr, PC/convertible, PC/XT, PC/AT and PS/2 (and...) has Microsoft Cassette BASIC in ROM! Power it up without a hard drive or floppy and get the power of BASIC!
Weird that so much would depend on Bill Gates desire to own the BASIC-in-ROM marketplace...
But really, that's not how the saying goes. They've made their choice: Fast and Good. The one they *don't* get, then, is cheap! :)
You truly do not understand how Linux works, nor do you seem willing to question your social-darwinistic view of business.
No. It has nothing to do with understanding business. It has everything to do with the ORIGINAL POINT OF THIS THREAD! The point is, free or non-free, different products from different vendors tend to be different. Period.
The whole *point* of this entire discussion is that LSB has been poorly supported. My point was, why would anyone expect differently? 30 years of UNIX has shown us that such efforts are extremely difficult. Why would Linux be magically different?
You keep trying to say that the magic of Linux will overcome 30 years of recorded history. Yet you then keep coming up with counter-examples: the fact that not one but two major distributions sprung up as incompatible modifications of the original parent, and that the most significant non-commercial distribution now has a popular offshoot that is now generating packages that are incompatible with the parent.
Why, again, is Linux going to magically overcome not only 30 years of history, but 5 years of their own actions? This is not just my darwinian view. This is actual reality. Again: why are they going to do it in the future, when they haven't done it in the past?
Do you think that IBM (or Sun, or...) would say, "Yeah, we're trying to lock in customers with AIX (or Solaris or...)"? Or do you think they just might say exactly what you said: "We're just trying to make AIX just that much better, but unfortunately, it's just a little bit different than Solaris..." Why is one lock-in and the other isn't? You can't have it both ways.
In short, you're wrong that corporate "screw you-ness" is the main reason holding back the LSB, but more of the fact that the LSB, at least on the outset, will shackle innovation--each distro maker has their own way of doing things, and many of these "ways" aren't random, but deliberate choices about how things should be done. The open (and egalitarian) nature of Linux encourages this. Eventually, though, expect the LSB to become more standard. User demand will always trump developer laziness in FS/OSS in the long run, especially since the developers are also the users, and vice versa.
I see. IBM and Sun are evil companies who set out to screw their customers by locking them in, but Red Hat and Novell are egalitarian companies unmotivated by profit and just trying to innovate? IBM and Sun completely ignored their users and fragmented the UNIX marketplace for no technical reasons, purely motivated by greed and a desire to screw the users, while Red Hat and Novell will listen to their users and happily hold hands and sing in peace, love and harmony?
Last I checked, IBM and Sun happily sold *millions* of copies of their UNIXes to willing customers. It's not like there weren't alternatives. It's not like there weren't *dozens* of attempts to unite under a common standard. So how was what IBM and Sun did *not* for the users? And why will Red Hat and Novell be able to overcome 30 years of actual *history*? Just because they want to?
You have a (very small) point about Debian/Ubuntu/Gentoo. Given their near total lack of ownership by a corporation, they are more likely to embrace user-driven standards. But the great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from. After all, I'm sure they all use compatible installation packages already, right, because users want that. Right?
Oh, wasn't there an article on /. just a couple of days ago about package incompatibilities between Debian and Ubuntu? Let me guess: Ubuntu was just 'making stylistic changes to make their distribution better'. For the users. Think of the users.
Wait: we *don't* live in such a world? Oh.
There has been 30 years of UNIX. In that 30 years, the closest we ever came to that kind of cross-platform standardization is CDE. Do *you* want to use CDE? Me neither.
While the advantage to the *user* might be great in the long run if everyone followed LSB, there is a great deal of disadvantage in the *short run* for companies. And that's why we see little success with LSB.
Because of the *awful* history page that would create, I've always been in the habit of backing up, rather than moving forward. I haven't had that feature in a browser in a decade, but I still back up rather than plow forward... :)
Sad, isn't it?
It was very cool that a browser was included at all, but I never remember it as being a great browser. I do remember using it for a while, but for the most part the only thing it ever did was download Netscape for OS/2!
Ironically, that's very similar to the only thing I ever use IE for: downloading Firefox! :)
I think that the definition of faith as something you believe without evidence is an extremely poor one. It's a very common one, especially among those who look down upon religion. It's also not what the Bible (my chosen old book...) says faith should be:
Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld.Hebrews 11:1.
Assured expectation and evident demonstration of realities does not expect "blind" faith. Rather, it expects that evidence has been presented to the person, who can use that evidence to extrapolate what will happen in the future.
I am naturally a skeptical person. I do *not* believe just because I have been told to. No one should believe something because they have been told to. Only because they have *proven* it to themselves.
The sad thing is that most religions teach that faith is exactly what you described. As someone who spends a great deal of time talking to others about religion, most people have been told that "God is a mystery" and "You're not supposed to know." Nothing could be further from the truth.
True faith only comes after something is proven to you. It's not what you need to overlook problems. It's what you have because, try as hard as you might, you can't find problems. When you see that something is correct after 10 times, you begin to believe that it'll be right on the 11th time as well. *That* is true faith.
I was a *long-time* OS/2 user up until 2001 or so, but I can't remember using WebExplorer voluntarily if there was *any* other browser on the system. Am I forgetting someting? What was so good about this that now two people write about it?!?
I was a *die-hard* OS/2 user up until 2001 or so, and I just retired my last OS/2 server this year. But even I wouldn't call WebExplorer anything even approaching neat...
If the answer to *any* of these are no, then you would agree that surveilance has limits, even on private property. The people in the article are encouraging others to think about these limits. Their actions taken out of context might be seen as silly. But doesn't the fact that people react so strongly to such obviously silly behiavior hint at the fact that people might have stronger feelings about the entire subject of surveilance if they thought more deeply about it?
I am one for whom causing people to think about their religious beliefs (myself definitely included) is as relevant as getting people to think about Linux versus Windows, or the state of patent and copyright law. Sadly, that seems like a pretty small amount on Slashdot.
It *is* interesting to see individuals (many of whom seem to be on Slashdot) who consider "keeping an open mind" an important quality in *everything* other than Religion.
Like I said, fascinating.
We all know that there are cameras. But do you think the majority of people give thought to just how *many* cameras there are? Or do you think people think about how much they are giving up, versus how much they are gaining?
Doesn't the fact that there was such a strong reaction to something that is really so pointless (taking pictures of cameras!) demonstrate that there is value in getting people to think about the power of surveilance? I would agree with you if everyone thought that their actions were meaningless, but in fact just the opposite happened: people reacted *strongly* to their actions, the sousveilance. So why shouldn' people react strongly to the surveilance?
But the more I thought about it, the more clever it becomes. It forces people to think about the actions of the cameras based on an action that, in and of itself, is harmless and non-threatening. The fact that people were *threatened* by such a non-threatening, even pointless action should cause them to think long and hard about how they should feel about the impact of the actual surveillance.
So, after futher reflection, I would have to say that their actions are brilliant. Will most people think that deeply about it? Maybe not immediately. But I think that at least *some* people will reflect upon this.
Bering is, AFAIK, x86-only. Of course, it is completely open source, and you could recompile for different targets. However, I do not believe that there are any binary packages for MIPS. I use it with Mini-ITX systems with no moving parts. That's quite a bit more expensive than the Linksys router! :)
Of course, I use a Bering Leaf Firewall which uses DNSCache (from DJB DNS) already...
Like just about every business decision, the answer is a solid "It depends".
They're titled just like a car (or, more specifically, like a car trailer...). When you buy or sell one, you transfer a title just like transfering a title to a car.
I know all this because I now live in my second mobile home. 1800 ft^2, $40,000 in Rochester, Michigan. I put an offer on a *1200* ft^2 house at $175,000 and was turned down.
People complain that you don't gain equity in a mobile home like you do in a house. That's fine. I take the $1300 a month I would have put into a mortgage on a house significantly smaller, and put it all into an index mutual fund. 10% increase per year: at least as good as what I would have gotten from a home!
Also, you then have a computer with two completely unrelated environments. There's no integration between them. Whereas things like having different ABI's (i.e. a Posix subsystem and a Win32 subsystem) allows you to use the applications together, rather than using them as two computers with a single KVM...
OS/2 had a package called EMX. EMX was to OS/2 what Cygwin is to Windows. With it, people would compile UNIX apps for OS/2, and they would just require a single DLL, not the entire craziness that Cygwin-compiled apps can be.
This compatibility was so good that all of X Windows could be compiled for OS/2, leading to XFree86OS/2 (some name, eh?). Windows now has the same thing with Cygwin/X, but OS/2 had it back in 1996...
It was really very nice to be able to run the real UNIX versions of things like Bind, Sendmail, IRCd, Apache and other such UNIX daemons. Of course, you could do the same with Linux, but like I said, this was back in the mid-90's. If you think Linux driver support can be bad today, try back then! At least OS/2 had *some* hardware drivers! :)
Even today, a ton of OS/2 software is ported to OS/2 using EMX, at least in the beginning: Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, and other such Linux Open Source projects.
The idea of building a UNIX (or Linux) subsystem for Windows is an *old* one. As TFA mentions, Posix "compatibility" was built into Windows NT from day one. The fact that it's still a steaming pile of cow dung shows how much of a desire there is for it. The Windows people couldn't care less, and the UNIX people would rather swallow swords than use the NT kernel, especially with FreeBSD and Linux out there... Is this doable? Absolutely. Is it worthwhile? People's words to the contrary, there hasn't been a huge groundswell of support...
What, you say? How is that?
Simple: evolution is the change in a gene's frequency over time. That I believe in. Does the frequency of a gene change, especially due to its usefulness in a creature's environment? Sure. However, do I believe that things like, oh, say, kidneys all of a sudden appearing into fish in an extraordinarily small number of generations due to a change in gene frequency because of some single or series of mutations? No. To me, intelligent design makes a lot more sense than that.
(I chose kidneys because the kidneys in the evolutionarily oldest fish (sharks) are fully formed and far more complete to reclaim as much water as they can, rather than those of evolutionarily younger fish (freshwater), where the kidney is a crude device that pushes water out as fast as it can.)
Anyway, just wanted to add fuel to the fire! :)