The article's title reads: SCO sends notices to 6,000 Linux licensees. The rest of the article contains no such error. Now, that wouldn't be false but alarming on purpose, would it?
Besides, since early 2.5 kernel development, fixing old SCSI drivers has been more or less prominently on the must-fix list and has stayed there ever since.
Apart from the SCSI problems, I have been very happy with a very fast 2.6.0-test11 on an ancient Dual Pentium 133 (HP Vectra XU 5/90), so I can't wait (or actually I can and will have to wait) for something like 2.6.4 until that system really roars again.
Correction: in my previous post I, of course, meant to write 'DMA-mapped', not 'mmapped' (whatever the difference may be).
.. 'I have changed all of the old SCSI drivers to mmapped' is *not* mentioned in the changelog, so I gather they are still broken. Worse still, 'fixing passive ISDN device drivers' isn't mentioned at all, so it will probably take a couple more releases before I can get my phone call logger and answering machine going. Or I could learn C, spend weeks reading the sources and do it myself, of course.
Man, that was fast. One second I was loading and reading the libcaca page, I immediately browsed down to the links to the images, and after some 30 seconds after I loaded the page, already the PNG's (or indeed the entire server) was unavailable. There is a mirror for the images, though:
Some of the prognostications and conclusions reached may not be palatable to Slashdot readers.
quoted from the original contributor? The article itself, meanwhile, states:
"Certainly you can't be advocating this!" Well, duh . . . of course not!
So, apart from questioning the need for a disclaimer toward an audience of individual minds that considers themselves to be free and critical minds (well, part of us at least then), I'd like to ask what elements in the article might not be palatable; John Walker (for those who have not read the actual article) very clearly states this is his view of the future, not his own wish for the future, especially here:
In this document I will provide a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past.
You can disagree with his theory that things will turn out this way, and history will surely tell us in the future how his predictions stand the test of time.
You could hardly call this work unpalatable, unless you read it the wrong way. In that respect, the article is never really clear on exact point of view of the author on each subject he glosses over, but careful reading certainly makes it more palatable.
In contrast, the GPL boils down to: "Here's the source code. You can use it if you want but then you must make it and your derivatives based on it available to the public."
It's a shame that one little mistake slipped in here. As far as I know, it should have read:
You can use it if you want, but if you want to redistribute it, then you must make the source code and your derivatives based on it available to the public.
I know Sun simply bought StarOffice, and that Scott McNeally said it a long time ago, but StarOffice (even when it takes the form of the OpenOffice 1.1.0 release candidate I know like to use) is valiantly attempting to match Microsoft Office's bloat factor, and must by now be at 0.8 in that respect. But I like one particular feature about the bloated text editor that comes with it (or is actually and irritatingly part of the same process).
What I like is that for the program to suggest how a word is going to end (Word Completion), I do not first need to tell it which words it is supposed to offer up, as with Microsoft Word, which I am regularly forced to use by my clients' requirements. Instead, OpenOffice kindly remembers some 9000 words that are longer than 5 characters for me (I tweaked the number of words a bit, can't even remember what the default number is).
I translate (technical) books for a living, and having a built-in word completion feature like this, that bases suggestions on what I have previously entered in as useful words for that document (a document could easily hold up to 80,000 words, depending on the book and on the state of completion of the translation, of course), is immensely useful.
Nevertheless, OpenOffice almost never gets in my way anymore. OK, I had to turn off a lot of features that are probably very useful for writing half-page letters, but get in your way after about three pages, and I had to find a proper font as well as a way to tell the program (I was going to say "tool") to make that choice of font stick, but after that, and after subsequent upgrades to newer versions up to the current one (where's me final 1.1.0?) I have never experienced such trouble again. I almost never visit the menus (pahh!), except for nice new features such as Export to PDF and for the way to the ever-irritating print settings dialogs (so basically, I can use it by opening the File menu once in a while).
Now if only OpenOffice had a half-decent Dutch spell checker, I could do entirely without MSWord (which has a half-decent one, not a decent one), which after typing a mere 25 pages or so, starts running in circles; looping endlessly; a problem most likely to be fixed in the release after the upcoming release.
As it stands, Microsoft is already abusing typing and spelling errors to redirect unwitting users to the MSN Search site. It's probably just a matter of time before some big fat new search engine conglomerate sues Microsoft for draining search engine users away from their sites illegitimately, abusing its proven and condemned desktop monopoly... again.
The latest I've read about it says SCO still has a Ransom Love working for them. Where's this charismatic, open source loving creature gone. Has he been ransomed?
Actually, the "Teledienstgesetz" requires such an imprint as well if your purely personal web site contains any kind of ad( banner)s or a forum or any other kind of message board or guest book.
... it is required by law that anyone who publishes even a single web page on the Web (in Germany) enclose an "Impressum", an imprint that notifies visitors whom to contact or hold accountable for the content. I wish this would also be implemented for Whois as a security measure or a basis for trust.
Anyone who still wants to publish anonymously could still do it abroad, of course, as there will always be registrars who and nations that don't care about trust.
I mention trust here, because I can trust a company's products (i.e. a shop selling goods) if I know where I can go, or what number I can call: currently too many (some) web shops (at least locally) do not even mention a telephone number I can call to have an order confirmed or more product information detailed. The same holds for web sites that provide information: if the e-mail address is left out, how can I get any confirmation, more detailed information, conversation or feedback going?
I downloaded and listened to the 60 second Nine Inch Nails sample MP3 of "Hurt", and it sounded like an exact copy of the original (which I paid for, BTWRIAA), except for a lot of stuttering, as if the CD player had trouble finding the right groove. There was nothing special about these artefacts, apart from the urge I felt to take out the MP3 file and blow the dust particles off its surface.
About 64-bit gaming performance
on
AMD64 Preview
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This was only in 32-bit mode no less! I can't wait for 64-bit benchmarks come out!
The above seems to imply that game benchmark results will be better at 64-bit. Now, if those games needed access to many gigabytes of game data, that would be an entirely correct assumption.
Apart from the utter pointlessness of 64-bit gaming for the coming years because of the comparatively humble data requirements of current games, a benchmark of 64-bit gaming performance (say, its 3D calculation or its AI plotting performance) would be mostly a waste of time, as you would see very likely only see an equalling performance at best.
Microsoft renewed its "generic UNIX license" with SCO a couple of weeks (months already?) ago, so it shouldn't have to pay Tux Tax now, should it? I assumed that was obvious.
So what would I need to pay for myHewlett Packard Vectra XU 5/90, which I guess is eight or nine years old now, runs SuSE Linux 7.2 with a 2.4 kernel, and has TWO Pentium 54C's running at a meager 133MHz?
As far as I know, the Usenet message reader in Outlook Express uses exactly the same dangerous HTML/scripting concept and libraries the e-mail reader uses. Therefore, and because of OE's lack of distinction between e-mail messages and Usenet messages, Usenet worms are already in place, as long as someone posts them to a news group, and noone cares to delete them or at least remove the payload.
You could of course get a trackball. The Kensington Expert Mouse *** range is pretty good because of the 5.5 centimeter ball and large buttons, but hard to clean (having to unscrew the entire casing to get to the dirt). The Logitech Marble Mouse is ancient technology now (the first direct-optical pointing device it seems, hence the ugly spotted red ball), but it's a proven concept. The ball is somewhat smallish at 1.5 inches, but it's dead easy to clean. Remember, with a trackball you always know where your towel,... I mean pointing device is, the pointer doesn't move when you click (so you don't need to hold your breath while you double click). Both trackballs saved me from aches and tingling sensations, a stiff left arm, and occasional neck, back and head aches, because your hand needs to be very active to point, while you don't lose accuracy. Another good point is you can setup trackballs for multiple computers in a tight desktop space, because you won't have to move them anyway like you do with a mouse.
That simply isn't what happened. If you completely missed the introduction of USB 2.0, and failed to read up on the buzzwords Full Speed and High Speed as they were explained to the press, you are very likely to think that the industry is suddenly lying to you. It's natural.... trying to obfuscate the situation
I merely tried to give a lot of information and a half-decent attempt to analyse the article. Now it's open for discussion, and nothing is obfuscated.
(BTW, I mixed up standards and buzzwords myself previously. 8-) Full Speed is the same speed as USB 1.1 on a USB 2.0 device, whilst High Speed is the full USB 2.0 speed. I'm sorry.)
The article in the Bangkok Post contains so much nonsense I don't know where to start!
1) First of all, there's absolutely no reason to mention Linux in the article. Skip all the stuff about the BSA as well, and you're already down to paragraph #4.
2) It goes on about USB's history, which may enlighten some of you out there. Then, it opposes USB and FireWire. While the FireWire concept had been around for years before the year 1999 when USB 1.1 took hold according to the author, they never actually competed. FireWire was quickly adopted by Sony (iLink they renamed it IIRC) and others, and its high bandwidth was used to transfer digital video to mainly Apple machines. USB was adopted radically in the same year 1999 to replace all manual input device interfaces Apple had been using for years, not for transferring large volumes of data, until image scanners with USB came around. Can anyone name a FireWire keyboard or mouse? No, so why did the Bangkok author mention some illusory rivalry between the two?
3) It goes on to say that USB 2.0 is "nearly as fast as FireWire at 480Mbps", which is debatable at the least. FireWire has had years to ripen and mature, while USB 2.0 has years of development, rethinking and improvement to come. The average user whom the author claims is being misled wouldn't know the difference between the two until a USB 2.0 scanner and a FireWire-connected digicam hit him squarely in the face at the same instant. Oh, and Why was FireWire even part of this piece? Right, there's no reason. The author is simply building up to something, and does some namedropping on his way.
4) Then he finally comes up with something substantial (that USB 1.1 has been renamed USB 2.0), but fails to give the slightest shred of evidence, not even a link to a press release noone (certainly not anyone regularly reading/.) would have failed to notice. His claim remains entirely unsubstantiated.
5) Now we get to the good bit: the author clearly shows he has been confused by some of the buzzwords the marketing people (indeed, probably those at the USB Forum) have concocted to still be able to market USB 1.1 while USB 2.0 is out and while the USB 1.1 parts and peripherals haven't been sold out. The buzzwords Full Speed USB and High Speed USB (however you like to spell those; the marketing people at the local computer store will probably get them wrong anyway) quite literally point to different USB standards. What the author finally tries to achieve is to substitute the wrong buzzwords for the USB standards versions and vice versa.
6) Finally he claims he didn't substitute them wrongly, but some manufacturers did, and allegedly they did it unwittingly. They just went and built computers with some components some bloke handed to them, and whey-ho, they turned out to be the USB 1.1 ones, so they had to ask the USB Forum to fiddle with the definitions a bit in order to still be able to sell them slow machines as faster ones.
Slashdot Mirror
The article's title reads: SCO sends notices to 6,000 Linux licensees. The rest of the article contains no such error. Now, that wouldn't be false but alarming on purpose, would it?
Someone had to point it out:
"very similar, but not the same as, dishwater"
is almost, but not quite, entirely like:
"almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea" (Douglas Adams).
Or you could pay someone else to do it.
Not on my budget, I can't.
Besides, since early 2.5 kernel development, fixing old SCSI drivers has been more or less prominently on the must-fix list and has stayed there ever since.
Apart from the SCSI problems, I have been very happy with a very fast 2.6.0-test11 on an ancient Dual Pentium 133 (HP Vectra XU 5/90), so I can't wait (or actually I can and will have to wait) for something like 2.6.4 until that system really roars again.
Correction: in my previous post I, of course, meant to write 'DMA-mapped', not 'mmapped' (whatever the difference may be).
.. 'I have changed all of the old SCSI drivers to mmapped' is *not* mentioned in the changelog, so I gather they are still broken. Worse still, 'fixing passive ISDN device drivers' isn't mentioned at all, so it will probably take a couple more releases before I can get my phone call logger and answering machine going. Or I could learn C, spend weeks reading the sources and do it myself, of course.
Man, that was fast. One second I was loading and reading the libcaca page, I immediately browsed down to the links to the images, and after some 30 seconds after I loaded the page, already the PNG's (or indeed the entire server) was unavailable. There is a mirror for the images, though:
http://www.via.ecp.fr/~sam/local/libcaca/
Why was this:
Some of the prognostications and conclusions reached may not be palatable to Slashdot readers.
quoted from the original contributor? The article itself, meanwhile, states:
"Certainly you can't be advocating this!"
Well, duh . . . of course not!
So, apart from questioning the need for a disclaimer toward an audience of individual minds that considers themselves to be free and critical minds (well, part of us at least then), I'd like to ask what elements in the article might not be palatable; John Walker (for those who have not read the actual article) very clearly states this is his view of the future, not his own wish for the future, especially here:
In this document I will provide a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past.
You can disagree with his theory that things will turn out this way, and history will surely tell us in the future how his predictions stand the test of time.
You could hardly call this work unpalatable, unless you read it the wrong way. In that respect, the article is never really clear on exact point of view of the author on each subject he glosses over, but careful reading certainly makes it more palatable.
In contrast, the GPL boils down to: "Here's the source code. You can use it if you want but then you must make it and your derivatives based on it available to the public."
It's a shame that one little mistake slipped in here. As far as I know, it should have read:
You can use it if you want, but if you want to redistribute it, then you must make the source code and your derivatives based on it available to the public.
Hey, we know already that humans are not the most intelligent race on the face of the Earth, let alone pandimensional.
I know Sun simply bought StarOffice, and that Scott McNeally said it a long time ago, but StarOffice (even when it takes the form of the OpenOffice 1.1.0 release candidate I know like to use) is valiantly attempting to match Microsoft Office's bloat factor, and must by now be at 0.8 in that respect. But I like one particular feature about the bloated text editor that comes with it (or is actually and irritatingly part of the same process).
What I like is that for the program to suggest how a word is going to end (Word Completion), I do not first need to tell it which words it is supposed to offer up, as with Microsoft Word, which I am regularly forced to use by my clients' requirements. Instead, OpenOffice kindly remembers some 9000 words that are longer than 5 characters for me (I tweaked the number of words a bit, can't even remember what the default number is).
I translate (technical) books for a living, and having a built-in word completion feature like this, that bases suggestions on what I have previously entered in as useful words for that document (a document could easily hold up to 80,000 words, depending on the book and on the state of completion of the translation, of course), is immensely useful.
Nevertheless, OpenOffice almost never gets in my way anymore. OK, I had to turn off a lot of features that are probably very useful for writing half-page letters, but get in your way after about three pages, and I had to find a proper font as well as a way to tell the program (I was going to say "tool") to make that choice of font stick, but after that, and after subsequent upgrades to newer versions up to the current one (where's me final 1.1.0?) I have never experienced such trouble again. I almost never visit the menus (pahh!), except for nice new features such as Export to PDF and for the way to the ever-irritating print settings dialogs (so basically, I can use it by opening the File menu once in a while).
Now if only OpenOffice had a half-decent Dutch spell checker, I could do entirely without MSWord (which has a half-decent one, not a decent one), which after typing a mere 25 pages or so, starts running in circles; looping endlessly; a problem most likely to be fixed in the release after the upcoming release.
As it stands, Microsoft is already abusing typing and spelling errors to redirect unwitting users to the MSN Search site. It's probably just a matter of time before some big fat new search engine conglomerate sues Microsoft for draining search engine users away from their sites illegitimately, abusing its proven and condemned desktop monopoly... again.
The latest I've read about it says SCO still has a Ransom Love working for them. Where's this charismatic, open source loving creature gone. Has he been ransomed?
Actually, the "Teledienstgesetz" requires such an imprint as well if your purely personal web site contains any kind of ad( banner)s or a forum or any other kind of message board or guest book.
... it is required by law that anyone who publishes even a single web page on the Web (in Germany) enclose an "Impressum", an imprint that notifies visitors whom to contact or hold accountable for the content. I wish this would also be implemented for Whois as a security measure or a basis for trust.
Anyone who still wants to publish anonymously could still do it abroad, of course, as there will always be registrars who and nations that don't care about trust.
I mention trust here, because I can trust a company's products (i.e. a shop selling goods) if I know where I can go, or what number I can call: currently too many (some) web shops (at least locally) do not even mention a telephone number I can call to have an order confirmed or more product information detailed. The same holds for web sites that provide information: if the e-mail address is left out, how can I get any confirmation, more detailed information, conversation or feedback going?
I downloaded and listened to the 60 second Nine Inch Nails sample MP3 of "Hurt", and it sounded like an exact copy of the original (which I paid for, BTWRIAA), except for a lot of stuttering, as if the CD player had trouble finding the right groove. There was nothing special about these artefacts, apart from the urge I felt to take out the MP3 file and blow the dust particles off its surface.
This was only in 32-bit mode no less! I can't wait for 64-bit benchmarks come out!
The above seems to imply that game benchmark results will be better at 64-bit. Now, if those games needed access to many gigabytes of game data, that would be an entirely correct assumption.
Apart from the utter pointlessness of 64-bit gaming for the coming years because of the comparatively humble data requirements of current games, a benchmark of 64-bit gaming performance (say, its 3D calculation or its AI plotting performance) would be mostly a waste of time, as you would see very likely only see an equalling performance at best.
Hey, you got my mod points there!
I don't think a patent is likely as there would be (homemade) prior art.
Will this mean the end of all these crazy SD-card connection based peripherals?
No, of course not. It just adds one more peripheral standard.
Microsoft renewed its "generic UNIX license" with SCO a couple of weeks (months already?) ago, so it shouldn't have to pay Tux Tax now, should it? I assumed that was obvious.
So what would I need to pay for my Hewlett Packard Vectra XU 5/90, which I guess is eight or nine years old now, runs SuSE Linux 7.2 with a 2.4 kernel, and has TWO Pentium 54C's running at a meager 133MHz?
As far as I know, the Usenet message reader in Outlook Express uses exactly the same dangerous HTML/scripting concept and libraries the e-mail reader uses. Therefore, and because of OE's lack of distinction between e-mail messages and Usenet messages, Usenet worms are already in place, as long as someone posts them to a news group, and noone cares to delete them or at least remove the payload.
You could of course get a trackball. The Kensington Expert Mouse *** range is pretty good because of the 5.5 centimeter ball and large buttons, but hard to clean (having to unscrew the entire casing to get to the dirt). The Logitech Marble Mouse is ancient technology now (the first direct-optical pointing device it seems, hence the ugly spotted red ball), but it's a proven concept. The ball is somewhat smallish at 1.5 inches, but it's dead easy to clean. Remember, with a trackball you always know where your towel, ... I mean pointing device is, the pointer doesn't move when you click (so you don't need to hold your breath while you double click). Both trackballs saved me from aches and tingling sensations, a stiff left arm, and occasional neck, back and head aches, because your hand needs to be very active to point, while you don't lose accuracy. Another good point is you can setup trackballs for multiple computers in a tight desktop space, because you won't have to move them anyway like you do with a mouse.
SCO's Tux tax.
And if that's what happened
... trying to obfuscate the situation
That simply isn't what happened. If you completely missed the introduction of USB 2.0, and failed to read up on the buzzwords Full Speed and High Speed as they were explained to the press, you are very likely to think that the industry is suddenly lying to you. It's natural.
I merely tried to give a lot of information and a half-decent attempt to analyse the article. Now it's open for discussion, and nothing is obfuscated.
(BTW, I mixed up standards and buzzwords myself previously. 8-) Full Speed is the same speed as USB 1.1 on a USB 2.0 device, whilst High Speed is the full USB 2.0 speed. I'm sorry.)
The article in the Bangkok Post contains so much nonsense I don't know where to start!
/.) would have failed to notice. His claim remains entirely unsubstantiated.
1) First of all, there's absolutely no reason to mention Linux in the article. Skip all the stuff about the BSA as well, and you're already down to paragraph #4.
2) It goes on about USB's history, which may enlighten some of you out there. Then, it opposes USB and FireWire. While the FireWire concept had been around for years before the year 1999 when USB 1.1 took hold according to the author, they never actually competed. FireWire was quickly adopted by Sony (iLink they renamed it IIRC) and others, and its high bandwidth was used to transfer digital video to mainly Apple machines. USB was adopted radically in the same year 1999 to replace all manual input device interfaces Apple had been using for years, not for transferring large volumes of data, until image scanners with USB came around. Can anyone name a FireWire keyboard or mouse? No, so why did the Bangkok author mention some illusory rivalry between the two?
3) It goes on to say that USB 2.0 is "nearly as fast as FireWire at 480Mbps", which is debatable at the least. FireWire has had years to ripen and mature, while USB 2.0 has years of development, rethinking and improvement to come. The average user whom the author claims is being misled wouldn't know the difference between the two until a USB 2.0 scanner and a FireWire-connected digicam hit him squarely in the face at the same instant. Oh, and Why was FireWire even part of this piece? Right, there's no reason. The author is simply building up to something, and does some namedropping on his way.
4) Then he finally comes up with something substantial (that USB 1.1 has been renamed USB 2.0), but fails to give the slightest shred of evidence, not even a link to a press release noone (certainly not anyone regularly reading
5) Now we get to the good bit: the author clearly shows he has been confused by some of the buzzwords the marketing people (indeed, probably those at the USB Forum) have concocted to still be able to market USB 1.1 while USB 2.0 is out and while the USB 1.1 parts and peripherals haven't been sold out. The buzzwords Full Speed USB and High Speed USB (however you like to spell those; the marketing people at the local computer store will probably get them wrong anyway) quite literally point to different USB standards. What the author finally tries to achieve is to substitute the wrong buzzwords for the USB standards versions and vice versa.
6) Finally he claims he didn't substitute them wrongly, but some manufacturers did, and allegedly they did it unwittingly. They just went and built computers with some components some bloke handed to them, and whey-ho, they turned out to be the USB 1.1 ones, so they had to ask the USB Forum to fiddle with the definitions a bit in order to still be able to sell them slow machines as faster ones.