The problem is that existing apps aren't really done up for them.
But there is potential.
* e-books (the obvious, really big market). * web browsing (maybe, *just maybe*, tablets will help move us back to a saner age without all this Flash and Javascript crap) * some games, like board-style with the system sitting between the players. I remember handing a PDA back and forth to play chess -- something like this
no offense but the assembler[sic] output surpassed the GCC compiler easily last time I checked, which is about a year ago
That clashes with what I've been seeing recently. Were you using full optimization with GCC? Some (IMHO rather obvious) optimizations are not done without -fexpensive-optimizations, for example.
I use -O6 -march=pentium2 -ffast-math -fstrict-aliasing -fexpensive-optimizations This is gcc 3.2...
Rasterman is probably one of the better examples of a skilled to-the-metal coder you're going to find. If gcc is generating comparable code, I'm into that.
gcc is supposed to be really good these days. I still think that it has *awful* C++ *compilation times*, but in terms of generated code...MSVC used to beat the crap out of it, but today I think it may generates some of the best, if not the best (and this includes icc), code of any compiler you can get your hands on for the x86. Not sure how good the SPARC/PPC/etc backends are -- I hear much more complaining about them.
I haven't seen any ultra recent benchmarks (if anyone's up to doing some benchmarks, please post 'em to Slashdot).
I think gcc is probably about as fast as you can push a C compiler -- to run any faster, we need more restricted languages to give the optimizer more guarantees about what's going on.
...I strongly suspect that this allocater has both good cases and bad cases (particularly given how mature ext2 is).
I'm actually using it ATM, but it wouldn't surprise me if it does something nasty (like increase fragmentation under low-free-space conditions or something).
At Carnegie Mellon University, you can request to have your resnet network segment placed on the MBONE. The network folks are pretty good about it -- I asked and was placed on it for a semester. Found that (at the time, three years ago) Linux multicast code was pretty buggy, hard freezing Linux occasionally.
I was interested in writing some multicast stuff, but never got around to it.
Most apps using the MBONE are quite old -- MPEG1 streaming and the like. They also use quite a bit of bandwidth.
The reason no one provides MBONE access is that (a) most of the apps that could use it *eat* bandwidth like crazy and (b) no one asks for it. RoadRunner is not going to put out MBONE access when about three users on their network care.
You might have better luck with a techie-friendly ISP, but maybe not even there...
Oh, and most of the apps that use the thing are pretty old...tk/tcl things that you can manage to get working with some work.
There are some newer protocols (I believe Cisco or Intel has some newer protocols or apps or something like that) that run on the MBONE, but no Linux implementations.
Frankly, last I looked, there weren't a lot of people trying to make it easy to play around with MBONE or the 6bone.
The biggest potential modern uses of the MBONE is probably:
* P2P -- have a server that queues up requests for a file for a day or two or three, and then starts sending all of them at once * A backbone for video over IP used to replace the current TV networks. Or maybe Internet radio over networks -- if Netscape shipped with a WinAmp with Digitally Imported bookmarked, there might be enough simultaneous listeners for it to be worthwhile for ISPs to use MBONE support.
MBONE is cool in that it's a great equalizer -- a single person can share as much as a massive company can traditionally, with far fewer bandwidth costs. It reminds me of a bit of what the Internet did for traditional media...
The abstract is intended to clarify the patent. The claims are what are legally significant here. Look a bit lower...anything that violates even *one* of the claims infringes on the patent.
I believe that, unlike with trademarks, there is no use-it-or-lose-it requirement on patents. You can selectively enforce, not enforce, or completely enforce your rights on patents as you wish.
OTOH, with 8 zillion patents out there designed to be as obfuscated as possible to get past the PTO, this makes engineering a minefield.
I'd prefer a specific exemption making the complaint that a "patent is unclear" becoming a complete defense against patent infringement. It'd also make it *much* easier for the PTO to administer the patents (instead of insanely complicated patents, they'd give the companies an enormous incentive to write their patents clearly and include useful keywords). It's more effective than just rejecting patents, because it means that companies can't just "retry" patents until they get a valid one.
The PTO already puts up a full-text-search search engine, so this makes patent searches much more feasible.
Obviously, this couldn't be retroactive, but it would be useful for curbing patent abuses in the future.
your response is exactly what this dude, didn't ask for, another useless, why shouldn't it be free anyway?
However, I'm not (as of yet) being paid by the guy to be his consultant. If he wants answers of format foo, he can pay for them. Slashdot is a discussion board -- and I'm asking a question that I'm interested in after responding to a different post which was on topic.
fact is, not only do attorneys not like to be sued for bad advice, but when in doubt, they tend to behave like beaurocrats, and NO is the easiest, most cost efficient answer
This is *exactly* what I just rebutted. Attorneys may act this way...my point is that this behavior tends to *also* be in the company's best interest. If the attorney can't give a certain answer (and GPL issues have *not* been hammered out in court yet), and is over-cautious...well, a large company is also going to probably prefer being over-cautious.
open source is an uphill battle with entrenched enterprises that aren't called IBM
Because IBM is a *hardware* and *services* company, and has no reason to compete with open source in the least. No kidding traditional software companies (like MS) don't like open source.
the point is, that to most shareholders, telling them that their company made something to give away for free sounds bad. just how it is.
Erm...really? First of all, how often do *you* read reports sent you on stocks that you hold? Yeah, that's what I thought -- you skim them, look for the few numbers you care about, and then ignore them. Same here.
Giving away something for "free" has been done for ages. Promotions, etc. If credit card and other financial companies didn't do so, they wouldn't be doing nearly as well as they are now. And things like drivers (for PCs at least) are "free" already -- I doubt many "shareholders" are going to go into fits about source being given away as well.
and yes, i have released some nice open source thingees myself (not alot yet, but workin on it), this is not a Winblows coder speaking, just a realist
Thank you. Always nice to have more people having fun making stuff!
And, of course, there's always the third point -- device manufacturers don't want you to know how much of the lifting your CPU is actually doing. A lot of devices, in today's market of fast-as-hell CPUs and ultra-cheap devices, offload anything they can get away with (and some they probably shouldn't) onto the CPUs.
In real life, you probably want to have multiple apps running. You probably need to have the driver service the device at a decent number of times a second. Each time you need to service the device, you hit a context switch.
However, if the only thing running is the kernel and the userspace app, you will not experience any context switches.
On a similar note: what happens with GPLed demo apps?
If you want to put out a "demo" version of your software, and then later hand out the "real" version, it would seem that you'd run into problems -- unless you have two separate codebases. The person could just get your source, undefine IS_DEMO, and recompile.
I wonder if you can reasonably hand out code already processed with cpp. Probably not.
You have argued that copyright law is ubiquitous and of wide influence. It affects your magazine? Sure. That's quite different from being viral. (Actually, this is a pet peeve of mine -- "viral" has extremely negative connotations, but something being viral certainly doesn't mean it's bad -- it's just a particular method of propogation. Of course, MS PR flacks are having tons of fun with the negative connotations).
Now, I'm not saying that the GPL is bad, but it's certainly a reasonable argument to say that it propogates in a viral manner. That's one of what I consider the more interesting things about it. Once a small piece of GPL code enters a project, the entire project must become GPL, and start pumping out GPL code fragments which can then "infect" other projects.
It's hard to define what's "good" and "bad", especially since this isn't a simple model of "what helps this project" but "what provides everyone with the most benefit in the real world". However, I still feel that there's a reasonable argument that the GPL is actually good for its hosts -- symbiotic. It's designed to help reduce code reimplementation, and helps widely-used code be debugged.
To help drive my point home, one other thing that might be considered a symbiotic virus (at least in one point in time) would be Christianity. Ignore, for the moment, present complaints about the religion being obsolete or holding back technological advances. It certainly spreads virally -- each person is "infected" by the meme, "converted", and "encouraged to spread the word". Host resources are used to assist the virus in propogation. However, there are major benefits Christianity has provided to human society. If you're living in a society with not a lot of law enforcement (think, where people live pretty much by the sword (think of the Dark Ages and earlier), you have the threat of an ultimate magistrate (God, Judgement Day), and strong encouragement to not attack/betray/cheat your neighbors. That, in turn, helps the community-organism survive, and all the units that compose the community-organism are better off. Hence, a symbiote.
they don't want to get sued themselves for giving bad advice
I suspect this guy's company would also like to err on the side of not getting their ass sued off.
I don't understand what the point is of making the driver closed source -- I mean, how much *logic* are we talking about in this driver? If this is such an amazing, sophisticated thing, it should probably be running in userspace.
Nam Tai is within their legal rights to go after the person if (IANAL and this is not reading from a book, but it's somewhat close to the right requirements):
a) Factually incorrect information is knowingly or negliently posted by the person (public figures like politicians need to be shown to have knowingly done something, whereas your ordinary person or journalist only needs to be neglient).
b) That information causes material damages to the victim.
I do not think it is necessary for the person to intend to cause material damages to the victim.
developers such as...Blizzard...they actually care about what they are releasing
I'm with you on Id, don't have any comment on Epic...but Blizzard has some seriously bad software design. Remember the rampant cheating on their earlier networked games, because they weren't interested in solving the difficult problem of designing a game that wasn't hideously exploitable?
I really hate this whole "regulate the Net" thing. I *like* it being an environment where you can implement whatever neat tech ideas you have.
If you want guaranteed mail service, use a system designed with guaranteed behavior as part of the spec and have it *technologically* enforced, not as a matter of policy.
I fucking hate this gay ass penguin OS for a desktop (it really sucks!!!) but i'll take it any day over any commercial product if I need to save my ass.
Compared to what? You said that it was your partner that was a Windows nut...BSD? Solaris? As *desktop* systems?
How about the fact that Blizzard games sell insanely well, no matter how bad they are compared to the competition (e.g. Starcraft versus Total Annihilation), because of the huge amount of bucks that go into marketing them.
Frankly the bitter, unhappy truth is that good marketing is more important than good programming.
Slashdot Mirror
MS needs a market for XP embedded/CE.
The problem is that existing apps aren't really done up for them.
But there is potential.
* e-books (the obvious, really big market).
* web browsing (maybe, *just maybe*, tablets will help move us back to a saner age without all this Flash and Javascript crap)
* some games, like board-style with the system sitting between the players. I remember handing a PDA back and forth to play chess -- something like this
no offense but the assembler[sic] output surpassed the GCC compiler easily last time I checked, which is about a year ago
That clashes with what I've been seeing recently. Were you using full optimization with GCC? Some (IMHO rather obvious) optimizations are not done without -fexpensive-optimizations, for example.
I use
-O6 -march=pentium2 -ffast-math -fstrict-aliasing -fexpensive-optimizations
This is gcc 3.2...
Rasterman is probably one of the better examples of a skilled to-the-metal coder you're going to find. If gcc is generating comparable code, I'm into that.
gcc is supposed to be really good these days. I still think that it has *awful* C++ *compilation times*, but in terms of generated code...MSVC used to beat the crap out of it, but today I think it may generates some of the best, if not the best (and this includes icc), code of any compiler you can get your hands on for the x86. Not sure how good the SPARC/PPC/etc backends are -- I hear much more complaining about them.
I haven't seen any ultra recent benchmarks (if anyone's up to doing some benchmarks, please post 'em to Slashdot).
I think gcc is probably about as fast as you can push a C compiler -- to run any faster, we need more restricted languages to give the optimizer more guarantees about what's going on.
(/me interested) You're using what filesystems here on Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows?
Having any performance area in which Windows beats Linux is a black eye...:-)
...I strongly suspect that this allocater has both good cases and bad cases (particularly given how mature ext2 is).
I'm actually using it ATM, but it wouldn't surprise me if it does something nasty (like increase fragmentation under low-free-space conditions or something).
At Carnegie Mellon University, you can request to have your resnet network segment placed on the MBONE. The network folks are pretty good about it -- I asked and was placed on it for a semester. Found that (at the time, three years ago) Linux multicast code was pretty buggy, hard freezing Linux occasionally.
I was interested in writing some multicast stuff, but never got around to it.
Most apps using the MBONE are quite old -- MPEG1 streaming and the like. They also use quite a bit of bandwidth.
The reason no one provides MBONE access is that (a) most of the apps that could use it *eat* bandwidth like crazy and (b) no one asks for it. RoadRunner is not going to put out MBONE access when about three users on their network care.
You might have better luck with a techie-friendly ISP, but maybe not even there...
Oh, and most of the apps that use the thing are pretty old...tk/tcl things that you can manage to get working with some work.
There are some newer protocols (I believe Cisco or Intel has some newer protocols or apps or something like that) that run on the MBONE, but no Linux implementations.
Frankly, last I looked, there weren't a lot of people trying to make it easy to play around with MBONE or the 6bone.
The biggest potential modern uses of the MBONE is probably:
* P2P -- have a server that queues up requests for a file for a day or two or three, and then starts sending all of them at once
* A backbone for video over IP used to replace the current TV networks. Or maybe Internet radio over networks -- if Netscape shipped with a WinAmp with Digitally Imported bookmarked, there might be enough simultaneous listeners for it to be worthwhile for ISPs to use MBONE support.
MBONE is cool in that it's a great equalizer -- a single person can share as much as a massive company can traditionally, with far fewer bandwidth costs. It reminds me of a bit of what the Internet did for traditional media...
And you think Microsoft would be a good replacement?
I assume you purchased it with *cash*...
Not quite. It wasn't conservative Republicans *actually* crashing into the WTC and then Bush blaming it on terrorists.
The abstract is intended to clarify the patent. The claims are what are legally significant here. Look a bit lower...anything that violates even *one* of the claims infringes on the patent.
I believe that, unlike with trademarks, there is no use-it-or-lose-it requirement on patents. You can selectively enforce, not enforce, or completely enforce your rights on patents as you wish.
OTOH, with 8 zillion patents out there designed to be as obfuscated as possible to get past the PTO, this makes engineering a minefield.
I'd prefer a specific exemption making the complaint that a "patent is unclear" becoming a complete defense against patent infringement. It'd also make it *much* easier for the PTO to administer the patents (instead of insanely complicated patents, they'd give the companies an enormous incentive to write their patents clearly and include useful keywords). It's more effective than just rejecting patents, because it means that companies can't just "retry" patents until they get a valid one.
The PTO already puts up a full-text-search search engine, so this makes patent searches much more feasible.
Obviously, this couldn't be retroactive, but it would be useful for curbing patent abuses in the future.
your response is exactly what this dude, didn't ask for, another useless, why shouldn't it be free anyway?
However, I'm not (as of yet) being paid by the guy to be his consultant. If he wants answers of format foo, he can pay for them. Slashdot is a discussion board -- and I'm asking a question that I'm interested in after responding to a different post which was on topic.
fact is, not only do attorneys not like to be sued for bad advice, but when in doubt, they tend to behave like beaurocrats, and NO is the easiest, most cost efficient answer
This is *exactly* what I just rebutted. Attorneys may act this way...my point is that this behavior tends to *also* be in the company's best interest. If the attorney can't give a certain answer (and GPL issues have *not* been hammered out in court yet), and is over-cautious...well, a large company is also going to probably prefer being over-cautious.
open source is an uphill battle with entrenched enterprises that aren't called IBM
Because IBM is a *hardware* and *services* company, and has no reason to compete with open source in the least. No kidding traditional software companies (like MS) don't like open source.
the point is, that to most shareholders, telling them that their company made something to give away for free sounds bad. just how it is.
Erm...really? First of all, how often do *you* read reports sent you on stocks that you hold? Yeah, that's what I thought -- you skim them, look for the few numbers you care about, and then ignore them. Same here.
Giving away something for "free" has been done for ages. Promotions, etc. If credit card and other financial companies didn't do so, they wouldn't be doing nearly as well as they are now. And things like drivers (for PCs at least) are "free" already -- I doubt many "shareholders" are going to go into fits about source being given away as well.
and yes, i have released some nice open source thingees myself (not alot yet, but workin on it), this is not a Winblows coder speaking, just a realist
Thank you. Always nice to have more people having fun making stuff!
And, of course, there's always the third point -- device manufacturers don't want you to know how much of the lifting your CPU is actually doing. A lot of devices, in today's market of fast-as-hell CPUs and ultra-cheap devices, offload anything they can get away with (and some they probably shouldn't) onto the CPUs.
It depends.
In real life, you probably want to have multiple apps running. You probably need to have the driver service the device at a decent number of times a second. Each time you need to service the device, you hit a context switch.
However, if the only thing running is the kernel and the userspace app, you will not experience any context switches.
On a similar note: what happens with GPLed demo apps?
If you want to put out a "demo" version of your software, and then later hand out the "real" version, it would seem that you'd run into problems -- unless you have two separate codebases. The person could just get your source, undefine IS_DEMO, and recompile.
I wonder if you can reasonably hand out code already processed with cpp. Probably not.
Two posts (parent and grandparent), neither of which links to any comments, which claim that a second person flatly contradicts himself. Lovely.
Why the hell can't you people find links, anyway?
You have argued that copyright law is ubiquitous and of wide influence. It affects your magazine? Sure. That's quite different from being viral. (Actually, this is a pet peeve of mine -- "viral" has extremely negative connotations, but something being viral certainly doesn't mean it's bad -- it's just a particular method of propogation. Of course, MS PR flacks are having tons of fun with the negative connotations).
Now, I'm not saying that the GPL is bad, but it's certainly a reasonable argument to say that it propogates in a viral manner. That's one of what I consider the more interesting things about it. Once a small piece of GPL code enters a project, the entire project must become GPL, and start pumping out GPL code fragments which can then "infect" other projects.
It's hard to define what's "good" and "bad", especially since this isn't a simple model of "what helps this project" but "what provides everyone with the most benefit in the real world". However, I still feel that there's a reasonable argument that the GPL is actually good for its hosts -- symbiotic. It's designed to help reduce code reimplementation, and helps widely-used code be debugged.
To help drive my point home, one other thing that might be considered a symbiotic virus (at least in one point in time) would be Christianity. Ignore, for the moment, present complaints about the religion being obsolete or holding back technological advances. It certainly spreads virally -- each person is "infected" by the meme, "converted", and "encouraged to spread the word". Host resources are used to assist the virus in propogation. However, there are major benefits Christianity has provided to human society. If you're living in a society with not a lot of law enforcement (think, where people live pretty much by the sword (think of the Dark Ages and earlier), you have the threat of an ultimate magistrate (God, Judgement Day), and strong encouragement to not attack/betray/cheat your neighbors. That, in turn, helps the community-organism survive, and all the units that compose the community-organism are better off. Hence, a symbiote.
they don't want to get sued themselves for giving bad advice
I suspect this guy's company would also like to err on the side of not getting their ass sued off.
I don't understand what the point is of making the driver closed source -- I mean, how much *logic* are we talking about in this driver? If this is such an amazing, sophisticated thing, it should probably be running in userspace.
Nam Tai is within their legal rights to go after the person if (IANAL and this is not reading from a book, but it's somewhat close to the right requirements):
a) Factually incorrect information is knowingly or negliently posted by the person (public figures like politicians need to be shown to have knowingly done something, whereas your ordinary person or journalist only needs to be neglient).
b) That information causes material damages to the victim.
I do not think it is necessary for the person to intend to cause material damages to the victim.
Most people who have large salaries deserve it...the other 10% didn't kiss enough ass to get to the top
I can see that you'll go far.
developers such as...Blizzard...they actually care about what they are releasing
I'm with you on Id, don't have any comment on Epic...but Blizzard has some seriously bad software design. Remember the rampant cheating on their earlier networked games, because they weren't interested in solving the difficult problem of designing a game that wasn't hideously exploitable?
I really hate this whole "regulate the Net" thing. I *like* it being an environment where you can implement whatever neat tech ideas you have.
If you want guaranteed mail service, use a system designed with guaranteed behavior as part of the spec and have it *technologically* enforced, not as a matter of policy.
I fucking hate this gay ass penguin OS for a desktop (it really sucks!!!) but i'll take it any day over any commercial product if I need to save my ass.
Compared to what? You said that it was your partner that was a Windows nut...BSD? Solaris? As *desktop* systems?
How about the fact that Blizzard games sell insanely well, no matter how bad they are compared to the competition (e.g. Starcraft versus Total Annihilation), because of the huge amount of bucks that go into marketing them.
Frankly the bitter, unhappy truth is that good marketing is more important than good programming.