Well, ther RT2400 works after a fashion (though if you run it for a few hours the driver will oops and take down your system).
There is no other 802.11g card that even gets close to that.
My ten year old is taught PP at school and is now better with it than me (getting old, but I've hacked kernel modules so this generational thing shouldn't be happening to ME!!).
Anyway, paranoia aside, I think RH deserve credit for their stance. It's often been the case on/. and elsewhere that they've been compared to MS as the lumbering megamonster that will gobble up Linux and destroy innovation. Well, their values - an important part of their brand - suggest otherwise.
I think he's wrong about the desktop though. I blow hot and cold on nix's chances on the desktop and right now I'm hot - I regularly monitor other people's web logs and stats to see how many people are browsing with Linux and I'd say, in the UK, it's doubled as a proportion of users in the last year. That means it's still only 1.5 - 2% but that's a growing share of a growing market. If it gets to 4 - 5% it's going to be about OS X levels and hardware vendors are going to have to take it seriously and that will be a big breakthrough - just trying telling the typical Window's user about how they can set up their 11g wireless card in Linux and you'll understand how important it is!
Well, this will allow you (or more likely your retailer) to verify that, for instance, the cow was raised organically. This sort of thing is now quite common in the EU.
Sure they are still gaining customers - in a market expanding this quickly you have be really bad not to do that.
But apache is winning big style - I wonder how many of those apache boxes are being hosted on Linux or BSD?
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. But I don't work in IT and in the last three places I worked there was no OSS in use whatsoever - nobody can pay for techies with enough brainpower to even hack Firefox. In my professional experience, it's just not there. When I am let off the leash then the Linux servers appear immediately - a quick and cheap way to build a server and so share filkes with the Windows clients and get a web presence on the end of an ADSL connection (with the help of dyndns) but these opportunities are few and far between and it seems everywhere I work I know more about computers than the IT staff.
Only this week/. posted an article about how vulnerable Firefox ('our' best hope for the majors) was. Linux on the desktop is as far away as it when I started using it four years ago (ask your non-techie friends), MS are still kings of the hill.
Sure, our little guerilla band has got a bit stronger: MS know they aren't going to get rid of us, so they just hop to contain us - and so far they are winning.
Indeed, the competition helps them with all that anti-trust stuff. Basically, I am not as optimistic about a free and open future for computing as I was even 18 months ago, though we have come along way since Byte declared Windows NT was the "death" of Unix.
Maybe I should have nothing more to do in life but read/. and then I'd have noticed this was a dupe, or whatever, but clearly I fail the nerdyness test because I was actually quite interested in this article and the points it raises.
I find it difficult to believe that any BeOS clone will beat Windows for all the obvious reasons - not least of which is that MS will buy any propreitary product that comes anywhere near cuasing them irritation - though that would probably be a positive outcome for the developers of zeta. Good luck to them if that's what they want, but I doubt they'll get there.
I suppose propreitary products just aren't going to beat MS unless they are something very very special - an OS and useland written in some uber type safe language with automatic checking for buffer overflows might have some merit - but who is spending the billions needed to write and market it? Not IBM, they are betting the farm (or one of the farms) on Linux.
Linux's model is the only way - from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs as someone once said. And it would be nice to get some of the Zeta/BeOS stuff in Linux (the filesystem) but we're not going to have that either as nobody is going to sell it to us (as nobody is going to buy) - so we have to rely on development efforts done for 'free' (in the sense the enduser isn't paying) and that is why Linux is also so weak - because everybody is relying on someone's good will to get so much of this done...
As I understand it, most users of a 64 bit Linux kernel are using a 32 bit (GNU? I want to avoid a religous war:)) userland, whereas this suggests Windows users can mix and match.
Is there a Linux equivalent available?
Having said all that I well remember getting MS to agree with me that there was a bug in their Win32 bolt on for Win16 that meant my software wouldn't run, but they then said they wouldn't fix it! No wonder I eventually switched to Linux... but that'sa whole other story.
More or less - you can choose to also dual licence the code - but I accept the basic point completely. But that's an argument in favour of enforcing the current GPL, not for banning dual licencing.
The point is that for his argument to hold then our theories of chemistry (age of rocks), particle physics (age of rocks), quantum mechanics (age of rocks) and general relativity (age of universe) all have to be false.
And we haven't even started on their appliocation to biology and geology.
That's a silly argument - or rather it is an argument against dual licencing per se. Any two licences will be incompatible in some way because if they weren't they'd be the same licence!
As a piece of journalism the BBC report is a disgrace to that orgnaisation's claim to be the world's greatest news gatherer.
Where has this patent been granted? In the UK (the assumption given the reporting organisation)? The EU? The US? Burkina Faso? Get a grip BBC - some of us are paying for you to produce this material and we deserve better than that.
My point here is that my beliefs aren't merely unfounded, eccentric ideas.
Err... come again? All our theories about the Universe, fundamental physical forces and biology are wrong - that is not eccentric? Well, I suppose not, plain bonkers is more like it. The claim that these things have not been proved scientifically can only be answered in the way first made famous by Dr Johnson - I refute it thus.
If i write some code and I licence it under the GPL and something else what is the problem?
You can take the GPL code and do what you like with it under the GPL, but I choose to licence what i have written under BSD (say) as well then what is the problem? It is going way OTT to take that away from me if I am gifting my work back to the community with the GPL. This is why I always stipulate that my code is licenced under GPL v2 and not any subsequent version - no self-appointed guardian has the right to take away my freedom to dual licence code.
You do *not* have to write it into the OS. If anything, that is the biggest flaw in Windows and one of the reasons why MS have spent a lot of time in court over supposedly irreducible bits of their OS.
The designers of Windows repeatedly put things inside the OS that shouldn't be for "performance" reasons - even the hoopla about their great "New Technology" OS proved to be no more than hot air because they locked all of it in the same address space as the Mach kernel- so practically negating the point of having a microkernel and making it BSOD-a-go-go for users with new/different hardware. Keep the components orthogonal and you get a better systems (though anyone using the HURD may disagree!)
To be honest about it, I think there is a lot of merit in the argument, inside the Linux community, for userspace filesystems but that's a whole different fish kettle.
There is something a bit odd about how people use these office suites. Lotus were practically giving away their software at the end and still nobody would use it (I always thought AmiPro was massively superior to MS Word 2).
Right now you can get Open Office for nothing more than the cost of a dowload and a DVD but MS Office must be outstripping it in new installs by - whaddya reckon- somewhere in the region of 1000:1 to 100:1.
But what is it that people get out of MS Office that they don't get with the free/cheap alternatives? I'll bet 99.9% of users get nothing. Or think of it another way - if you have less than 1000 employees then nobody is going to benefit.
I love free software, but even my other half (who uses it all the time at home because it's all I install) prefers MS for some reason. Why??
A few years ago I thought the Wintel monopoly was cracking up... now despite this (good) news that seems further away than for some time.
The constant hostility to Linux from Windows users is just one example - people are frightened of making the change and they cannot understand why something I can give them perfectly legally on a CD/DVD can be as good as or better than something they pay loads for.
So too with Intel - Apple's decision may even be good for Microsoft as it will help freeze out alternative combinations of OS with processors...
I think Linux will win through on the desktop, though it is taking a lot longer than I expected when I made the switch in 2001.
The reason is the people, not the software. Basically, the people who know about how stuff works are or have already switched. They will drive the move-over in the future.
A personal example will illustrate. I have a website that recently featured, very briefly, on a networked TV show.
The site was hit pretty hard within about 60 seconds of being mentioned, though the full url was not given on the show. A quick browse through the server logs showed it was Linux (and BSD) users who got there first. They then posted the links for other people to use.
If the people who know how stuff works use Linux then Linux is their OS of choice and, like me, they'll slowly get it on to the servers and agitate for it on the desktop.
It's true there were a few Windows users in the first round, but they were all using Firefox and I do think FF will be a route into Linux use because it shows open source delivers the goods.
Rexx was regarded as the best reason to buy OS/2 and I suppose all us nixiens ought to understand why a scripting language should trump a GUI (the Evil One's 3.1 offering back then).
Now days it just reminds me of that naff sci-fi thing and of why I should buy one of those books about bash and do the job properly.
One of my earliest memories (I was 3 at the time) is of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon.
The very sight of these things, never mind the strains of Also sprach Zarathustra, gives me goose pimples and reminds me of the glory days of the 1970s.
The main thing about BSD is that it doesn't seem to be very much fun (in a way that is what the article says too). Partly, that's a reflection of simple numbers - there are more of us Linux hackers out there. partly it's accessibility (read the posts here where people boast of how difficult it is to install the thing). Partly it's a different culture - I can get away with writing some not very good Linux drivers for odd boxes because other people will improve them - people welcome the work because it's a start and don't carp that it's poor engineering. I use *BSD a bit and I am not interested in any sort of religious warfare, but BSD is just too *serious* for a weekend hacker like me.
Given the tenor of many comments it seems not everybody has read this seminal text! Mind you, some of the politics is pretty much off the wall - especially in the post-bubble world.
The other issue is that the model highlights the extent to which we are all dependent on a few good citizens to give up their time and life to make this happen. Core teams work when people are being paid to do the job, but not when whn you are relying on the generousity of a few talented individuals.
I have to say that the real, phsyical world is still very hostile to Linux. By that I mean that if you are a linux user on the desktop then you will find it very tough in most commericial environments.
Support don't want to know and the incompatibilities in the technology mean that using Linux puts you at a serious commercial disadvantage.
I recently worked as a consultant (non-IT) in a Windows-only environment. The best I could do was get Evolution on my 'nix laptop to read and send my emails. Yes, I could have paid for the plug-in to get it to work with the Exchange address books, but for that money I more or less could have bought Win 98 - what was the point?
In five weeks I couldn't print anything more than a test page.
To be honest, towards the end of the struggle I thought of just buying the bloody MS software and giving up on Linux. But I stuck it out, but never again...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, ther RT2400 works after a fashion (though if you run it for a few hours the driver will oops and take down your system). There is no other 802.11g card that even gets close to that.
My ten year old is taught PP at school and is now better with it than me (getting old, but I've hacked kernel modules so this generational thing shouldn't be happening to ME!!). /. and elsewhere that they've been compared to MS as the lumbering megamonster that will gobble up Linux and destroy innovation. Well, their values - an important part of their brand - suggest otherwise.
Anyway, paranoia aside, I think RH deserve credit for their stance. It's often been the case on
I think he's wrong about the desktop though. I blow hot and cold on nix's chances on the desktop and right now I'm hot - I regularly monitor other people's web logs and stats to see how many people are browsing with Linux and I'd say, in the UK, it's doubled as a proportion of users in the last year. That means it's still only 1.5 - 2% but that's a growing share of a growing market. If it gets to 4 - 5% it's going to be about OS X levels and hardware vendors are going to have to take it seriously and that will be a big breakthrough - just trying telling the typical Window's user about how they can set up their 11g wireless card in Linux and you'll understand how important it is!
Well, this will allow you (or more likely your retailer) to verify that, for instance, the cow was raised organically. This sort of thing is now quite common in the EU.
Sure they are still gaining customers - in a market expanding this quickly you have be really bad not to do that.
But apache is winning big style - I wonder how many of those apache boxes are being hosted on Linux or BSD?
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. But I don't work in IT and in the last three places I worked there was no OSS in use whatsoever - nobody can pay for techies with enough brainpower to even hack Firefox. In my professional experience, it's just not there.
When I am let off the leash then the Linux servers appear immediately - a quick and cheap way to build a server and so share filkes with the Windows clients and get a web presence on the end of an ADSL connection (with the help of dyndns) but these opportunities are few and far between and it seems everywhere I work I know more about computers than the IT staff.
Only this week /. posted an article about how vulnerable Firefox ('our' best hope for the majors) was. Linux on the desktop is as far away as it when I started using it four years ago (ask your non-techie friends), MS are still kings of the hill.
Sure, our little guerilla band has got a bit stronger: MS know they aren't going to get rid of us, so they just hop to contain us - and so far they are winning.
Indeed, the competition helps them with all that anti-trust stuff. Basically, I am not as optimistic about a free and open future for computing as I was even 18 months ago, though we have come along way since Byte declared Windows NT was the "death" of Unix.
Maybe I should have nothing more to do in life but read /. and then I'd have noticed this was a dupe, or whatever, but clearly I fail the nerdyness test because I was actually quite interested in this article and the points it raises.
I find it difficult to believe that any BeOS clone will beat Windows for all the obvious reasons - not least of which is that MS will buy any propreitary product that comes anywhere near cuasing them irritation - though that would probably be a positive outcome for the developers of zeta. Good luck to them if that's what they want, but I doubt they'll get there.
I suppose propreitary products just aren't going to beat MS unless they are something very very special - an OS and useland written in some uber type safe language with automatic checking for buffer overflows might have some merit - but who is spending the billions needed to write and market it? Not IBM, they are betting the farm (or one of the farms) on Linux.
Linux's model is the only way - from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs as someone once said. And it would be nice to get some of the Zeta/BeOS stuff in Linux (the filesystem) but we're not going to have that either as nobody is going to sell it to us (as nobody is going to buy) - so we have to rely on development efforts done for 'free' (in the sense the enduser isn't paying) and that is why Linux is also so weak - because everybody is relying on someone's good will to get so much of this done...
As I understand it, most users of a 64 bit Linux kernel are using a 32 bit (GNU? I want to avoid a religous war :)) userland, whereas this suggests Windows users can mix and match.
Is there a Linux equivalent available?
Having said all that I well remember getting MS to agree with me that there was a bug in their Win32 bolt on for Win16 that meant my software wouldn't run, but they then said they wouldn't fix it! No wonder I eventually switched to Linux... but that'sa whole other story.
More or less - you can choose to also dual licence the code - but I accept the basic point completely. But that's an argument in favour of enforcing the current GPL, not for banning dual licencing.
The point is that for his argument to hold then our theories of chemistry (age of rocks), particle physics (age of rocks), quantum mechanics (age of rocks) and general relativity (age of universe) all have to be false.
And we haven't even started on their appliocation to biology and geology.
That's a silly argument - or rather it is an argument against dual licencing per se. Any two licences will be incompatible in some way because if they weren't they'd be the same licence!
As a piece of journalism the BBC report is a disgrace to that orgnaisation's claim to be the world's greatest news gatherer.
Where has this patent been granted? In the UK (the assumption given the reporting organisation)? The EU? The US? Burkina Faso? Get a grip BBC - some of us are paying for you to produce this material and we deserve better than that.
My point here is that my beliefs aren't merely unfounded, eccentric ideas.
Err... come again?
All our theories about the Universe, fundamental physical forces and biology are wrong - that is not eccentric? Well, I suppose not, plain bonkers is more like it.
The claim that these things have not been proved scientifically can only be answered in the way first made famous by Dr Johnson - I refute it thus.
If i write some code and I licence it under the GPL and something else what is the problem?
You can take the GPL code and do what you like with it under the GPL, but I choose to licence what i have written under BSD (say) as well then what is the problem? It is going way OTT to take that away from me if I am gifting my work back to the community with the GPL. This is why I always stipulate that my code is licenced under GPL v2 and not any subsequent version - no self-appointed guardian has the right to take away my freedom to dual licence code.
You do *not* have to write it into the OS. If anything, that is the biggest flaw in Windows and one of the reasons why MS have spent a lot of time in court over supposedly irreducible bits of their OS.
The designers of Windows repeatedly put things inside the OS that shouldn't be for "performance" reasons - even the hoopla about their great "New Technology" OS proved to be no more than hot air because they locked all of it in the same address space as the Mach kernel- so practically negating the point of having a microkernel and making it BSOD-a-go-go for users with new/different hardware.
Keep the components orthogonal and you get a better systems (though anyone using the HURD may disagree!)
To be honest about it, I think there is a lot of merit in the argument, inside the Linux community, for userspace filesystems but that's a whole different fish kettle.
There is something a bit odd about how people use these office suites. Lotus were practically giving away their software at the end and still nobody would use it (I always thought AmiPro was massively superior to MS Word 2).
Right now you can get Open Office for nothing more than the cost of a dowload and a DVD but MS Office must be outstripping it in new installs by - whaddya reckon- somewhere in the region of 1000:1 to 100:1.
But what is it that people get out of MS Office that they don't get with the free/cheap alternatives? I'll bet 99.9% of users get nothing. Or think of it another way - if you have less than 1000 employees then nobody is going to benefit.
I love free software, but even my other half (who uses it all the time at home because it's all I install) prefers MS for some reason. Why??
Perl is a great choice. You can do anything with it and nobody else understands what your code does so they have to get you to maintain it :)
A few years ago I thought the Wintel monopoly was cracking up ... now despite this (good) news that seems further away than for some time.
The constant hostility to Linux from Windows users is just one example - people are frightened of making the change and they cannot understand why something I can give them perfectly legally on a CD/DVD can be as good as or better than something they pay loads for.
So too with Intel - Apple's decision may even be good for Microsoft as it will help freeze out alternative combinations of OS with processors...
I think Linux will win through on the desktop, though it is taking a lot longer than I expected when I made the switch in 2001.
The reason is the people, not the software. Basically, the people who know about how stuff works are or have already switched. They will drive the move-over in the future.
A personal example will illustrate. I have a website that recently featured, very briefly, on a networked TV show.
The site was hit pretty hard within about 60 seconds of being mentioned, though the full url was not given on the show. A quick browse through the server logs showed it was Linux (and BSD) users who got there first. They then posted the links for other people to use.
If the people who know how stuff works use Linux then Linux is their OS of choice and, like me, they'll slowly get it on to the servers and agitate for it on the desktop.
It's true there were a few Windows users in the first round, but they were all using Firefox and I do think FF will be a route into Linux use because it shows open source delivers the goods.
Rexx was regarded as the best reason to buy OS/2 and I suppose all us nixiens ought to understand why a scripting language should trump a GUI (the Evil One's 3.1 offering back then). Now days it just reminds me of that naff sci-fi thing and of why I should buy one of those books about bash and do the job properly.
One of my earliest memories (I was 3 at the time) is of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. The very sight of these things, never mind the strains of Also sprach Zarathustra, gives me goose pimples and reminds me of the glory days of the 1970s.
The main thing about BSD is that it doesn't seem to be very much fun (in a way that is what the article says too).
Partly, that's a reflection of simple numbers - there are more of us Linux hackers out there. partly it's accessibility (read the posts here where people boast of how difficult it is to install the thing). Partly it's a different culture - I can get away with writing some not very good Linux drivers for odd boxes because other people will improve them - people welcome the work because it's a start and don't carp that it's poor engineering.
I use *BSD a bit and I am not interested in any sort of religious warfare, but BSD is just too *serious* for a weekend hacker like me.
Given the tenor of many comments it seems not everybody has read this seminal text! Mind you, some of the politics is pretty much off the wall - especially in the post-bubble world. The other issue is that the model highlights the extent to which we are all dependent on a few good citizens to give up their time and life to make this happen. Core teams work when people are being paid to do the job, but not when whn you are relying on the generousity of a few talented individuals.
I have to say that the real, phsyical world is still very hostile to Linux. By that I mean that if you are a linux user on the desktop then you will find it very tough in most commericial environments.
Support don't want to know and the incompatibilities in the technology mean that using Linux puts you at a serious commercial disadvantage.
I recently worked as a consultant (non-IT) in a Windows-only environment. The best I could do was get Evolution on my 'nix laptop to read and send my emails. Yes, I could have paid for the plug-in to get it to work with the Exchange address books, but for that money I more or less could have bought Win 98 - what was the point?
In five weeks I couldn't print anything more than a test page.
To be honest, towards the end of the struggle I thought of just buying the bloody MS software and giving up on Linux. But I stuck it out, but never again...
I operate an open node not more than 150 metres from a major railway bridge over the GNER - not seen any signs of a connection (yet) :)