What the hell are you smoking? Why don't you actually READ the license?
Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1
How exactly does the license prohibit free copying or redistribution of their product? As far as I understand, if you don't want support, you can just buy one copy and use it on all your computers. Or use somebody else's copy on your computers. You can even redistribute it if you remove redhat's trademarks. This is way, way, way better than what SuSE offers.
BTW, Mandrake uses a practically identical license for their server products.
What other 1U server packs in 4 drive bays, redundant power supplies and hot-plug PCI slots?
Why does it have to be 1U? Most, if not all, high-end servers are not 1U. If you need a reliable, high-end server for a critical application, I don't think size is going to be a major constraint. I think that supports my basic point: Xserve is strictly low-end.
Also, there are quite a few 1U servers with redundant power supplies. Just search on google. And most of them are about half the price of the lowest-end XServe.
And what brand and model are these "desktop quality" IDE drives?
Probably whatever brand and model Apple can get cheaper this week. There's a reason they don't list those things in the specs.
Or does a drive become desktop-quality just because it has an IDE board on the bottom instead of a SCSI board?
No. There are a few desktop-quality SCSI drives. But there are no enterprise-grade IDE drives that I know of. Do you see my point?
For the record, many IDE hard drives fail in one to two years. Of the 3 hard drives I bought in the last 2 years, 2 failed and one is currently making funny noises once in a while. I definitely wouldn't want to see that in a server.
The XServe RAID has redundant power supplies, so it's likely the next XServe will too.
Maybe it will at some point in the future. But it doesn't right now.
Anyway, why are you arguing? I think it's pretty obvious that the xserve is entry level, low end, or whatever you want to call it. It might make for a nice (though expensive) department file server, but it's really not suitable for running a big database or doing anything mission-critical.
The xserve is decidedly NOT enterprise-grade hardware. It uses cheap, desktop-quality IDE hard drives and doesn't come with basic options like redundant power supplies and hot-plug PCI slots. Not to mention the sluggish G4 processors, the same ones as used in desktop machines. And the memory only goes up to 2GB. Excuse me, but that's not an enterprise server. That's a low-end server. Perfect for a small department server or maybe for hosting a small website.
First, we are comparing desktop upgrades here. If apple made enterprise-quality hardware, we could compare those prices, too. Since they don't, I suppose we have to stick to comparing apples-to-apples. And yes, that G4 upgrade card does cost something like $500.
How many midsize or large businesses have you seen that don't use any middleware, custom, or vertical-market apps? Small businesses stay away from apple because it costs more. I thought it was self-explanatory.
ATI Technologies on Wednesday said it will release more programming specifications for its Rage line of graphics chips
First, these are just specifications, not drivers. Second, it's probably not all of them. Third, this is for the ancient Rage cards, not the Radeon-based ones.
Oh yes it does. It's not as ugly as the one on the PC (and doesn't display weird messages), but Macs certainly have one. If you want to see what it looks like, take out the hard drive(s) and power on the Mac.
I think you need to lower your expectations. Doing what you describe is pretty much impossible.
Writing compact code (usually in assembly) means said code requires top-notch programmers, has few features, takes a long time to write, is completely unmaintainable, unportable, and usually has tons of subtle bugs that take lots of time to find and exterminate. Those 4K demos are neat tricks, but they take a hell of a lot of time and resources to write. If not for the 4K limit, they could be written in one evening and have more features.
The only reason the Apple II could boot up that fast was because the OS was a piece of shit. Hell, it was hardly an OS. I would say the BIOS in your computer does five times as much as the Apple II OS. And it boots up instantly, too.
The point is, Windows XP or Linux or OpenOffice are all extremely complex programs. They do a lot of things. All of those things require programming. Furthermore, they have to be developed by a finite number of developers in a finite amount of time. A lot of times, they have to be portable from one OS or computer architecture to the next. Obviously, you can't write them in hand-coded machine language.
Finally, if you don't think that computing improved dramatically since the Apple II, why don't you keep using that machine? You seem to be happy with its efficiency and feature-completeness, right? If you think GUIs are not an important advancement, don't use them.
To sum up: most programs are slow not because of inefficiencies caused by lazy programming, but rather because of their complexity and flexibility. You can make a super-efficient program, or you can make a usable, feature-complete program. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Could I charge you for using my patent if you legally own the idea?
You can't own an idea. The closest you can come to that would be a patent. A copyright simply protects a certain chunk of text, of source code, or some other representation of an idea. If you write your own chunk of code that uses the same idea, it's yours (unless there are patents involved).
Well, people should be thinking about SCO once in a while. Of course, you can always live in a state of denial, but that makes you ignorant and uninformed. If you aren't reading the news about SCO, how are you going to reply to, say, your boss asking you about the lawsuit and how it relates to their Linux servers? I don't think saying "I don't care" would be very productive.
Besides, Slashdot is NOT providing publicity. It provides links to news reports in the mainstream media. Even if it didn't provide those links, people would read those reports/press releases. But then they would only see SCO's side of the story. Is that what you want?
he didn't damage the hard drive. the board failed on him,
Nope. RTFA. His POWER SUPPLY fried the HDD. I'd say it's definitely not the HD's fault it got fried. That's what I was referring to. If he had bought a better power supply, this would not have happened.
Actually, I know someone who had the exact same thing happen -- a bad PSU frying the whole system. At least in that case, it was an extremely cheap Chinese PSU that wasn't even UL-approved.
WTF are you talking about? How is an improved firmware version dishonest to the consumer? Hardware makers make revisions like that all the frigging time. Sometimes, certain parts become unavailable or too expensive so the hardware is revised to replace them. Other times, there are errors in the hardware or the firmware.
What I find more dishonest is that the asshole who wrote the article is planning to replace a drive that was damaged due to his own fault through the warranty. And then we all have to pay higher prices for HDs because assholes like him get warranty service when they aren't supposed to. I think Seagate should give him the finger instead of warranty service.
That's an improper analogy. If the code can be replaced in 4 hours, then the court will see that the code was not valuable or important and was most likely included by accident. Then, SCO won't be eligible for punitive damages. Remember: intent is very important here.
Here's a closer analogy. You borrow a pen from a co-worker. You forget to return said pen. Co-worker accuses you of theft, but refuses to say what you have stolen. I don't think the case would get very far, given that a pen hardly costs anything, the theft wasn't intentional, and you would likely return the pen had he asked.
OS/2 ran Win3.1 apps natively, so nobody wrote OS/2 apps, but Win3.1 apps.
If OS/2 hadn't run Windows apps, nobody would have ever used it. The reason it died was the high price and poor hardware support (it didn't run on non-IBM machines without a lot of tweaking). Stop using that example, for fuck's sake.
The lesson is that as soon as you support somebody else's standard, then nobody has any reason to use your standard.
Does linux have anything remotely resembling.Net? Other than mono, of course.
Why don't you people get a clue first? No underlying Mono infrastructure is threatened by patents, since ECMA requires that all patents be licensed at no charge, and.Net is standardized with them. There are a few pieces which could potentially be patented, but their removal would not significantly harm Mono. If Microsoft still hasn't sued the Wine project, there's a very slim chance they could sue Mono.
Your other side of the argument is basically the "not invented here" thing. If Microsoft invented it, it must be bad for free software. It's not like Microsoft can force Mono to change its ways, so I fail to see your point. Mono is not a Wine clone, it's a development framework for Linux, one that could potentially be very useful for writing portable software.
I don't see anyone here bitching about Java, even though it's also a similar, proprietary technology controlled by one party -- Sun. Hell, I would say that Linux is more of a threat to Sun than Microsoft. So why isn't Java a threat to Linux?
All programs will benefit. 64 bits allows for more than 4 gigs of RAM, without the nasty paging crap. There are more registers in the CPU, so programs compiled for it will run much faster. Obviously, it's good for computationally-intensive tasks (such as video encoding or 3D graphics). There's a reason why most GPUs are 256 or 512 bits these days -- it really does help.
This is another case of the government taking community property-- in this case the airwaves-- and selling it to the highest bidder, while keeping us from using them.
The FCC exists to REGULATE airwaves. Without the FCC, the airwaves would not be usable. See below.
Yes, the FCC grants an exclusion if you'r;e under 1 watt
No, they don't. Max field strength is 250uV at 3m for an intentional radiator in the 88-108MHz band. That translates to tiny fractions of a watt.
hell the FCC isn't even constitutional-- nowhere in the constitution is the FCC given authorization. (and if it aint' authorized in the constitution, its retained by the states and people, according to the constitution.)
Your ignorance is incredible. By that logic, no federal agency is constitutional.
And finally, NO, they do NOT transmit on the same frequencies as the local radio stations--otherwise your radio would pick up the local station rather than your transmitter
A small iTrip-like transmitter can easily block out a station if it's close to the radio. At longer distances, it causes interference. And they have to transmit on the same frequencies as radio stations, since the FM band is packed in most cities. You can't transmit "between" them without causing nasty interference.
you've just provided an example of a government created problem that government pretends to cure!
You are just clueless, aren't you?
Without the FCC and their regulation of the radio spectrum, the airwaves would be completely unusable. Just look at the unlicensed bands, like 2.4GHz. Everything interferes with everything else as it is -- my phone does not work when the microwave is on, and my wi-fi card doesn't work when the phone OR the microwave is on. The only reason stuff works at all is because the FCC mandates strict power limits and band usage rules (frequency hopping, etc).
Now imagine someone transmitting a broad signal with thousands of times more power. Imagine that everybody starts doing it. Everywhere. Across the whole spectrum. With shitty equipment that emits tons of harmonics. Soon, nobody will be able to use the airwaves for anything useful due to the interference.
Sure, the FCC is somewhat corrupt. But there is no fair way to divide an extremely limited resource like the airwaves among everyone. I'd say they do a pretty damn good job as it is.
You are an idiot, Mr. AC. Satellite receivers also PASSIVELY receive broadcasts, as does cable TV and every other form of TV. Yet it's illegal to receive either satellite or cable without paying a license fee.
we get ~30 commercial free and ~100 commercial for $300-$400 a year.
It's $400 a year if you don't get any of the commercial free channels. That's what my cable company charges for basic cable + variety crap (all shitty channels full of commercials) I pay around $60/month for cable with a few premium channels (not all, though). That's over $700 per year.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell are you smoking? Why don't you actually READ the license?
Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1
How exactly does the license prohibit free copying or redistribution of their product? As far as I understand, if you don't want support, you can just buy one copy and use it on all your computers. Or use somebody else's copy on your computers. You can even redistribute it if you remove redhat's trademarks. This is way, way, way better than what SuSE offers.
BTW, Mandrake uses a practically identical license for their server products.
Actually, you could only hire about 2 $70K sysadmins for that money. An employee usually costs close to 2 times his/her salary.
Heh. Funny that they don't run OS X on them, and they are not exactly servers. The article is really short on details, though.
That's because it's a 1U rackmount server.
So what?
What other 1U server packs in 4 drive bays, redundant power supplies and hot-plug PCI slots?
Why does it have to be 1U? Most, if not all, high-end servers are not 1U. If you need a reliable, high-end server for a critical application, I don't think size is going to be a major constraint. I think that supports my basic point: Xserve is strictly low-end.
Also, there are quite a few 1U servers with redundant power supplies. Just search on google. And most of them are about half the price of the lowest-end XServe.
And what brand and model are these "desktop quality" IDE drives?
Probably whatever brand and model Apple can get cheaper this week. There's a reason they don't list those things in the specs.
Or does a drive become desktop-quality just because it has an IDE board on the bottom instead of a SCSI board?
No. There are a few desktop-quality SCSI drives. But there are no enterprise-grade IDE drives that I know of. Do you see my point?
For the record, many IDE hard drives fail in one to two years. Of the 3 hard drives I bought in the last 2 years, 2 failed and one is currently making funny noises once in a while. I definitely wouldn't want to see that in a server.
The XServe RAID has redundant power supplies, so it's likely the next XServe will too.
Maybe it will at some point in the future. But it doesn't right now.
Anyway, why are you arguing? I think it's pretty obvious that the xserve is entry level, low end, or whatever you want to call it. It might make for a nice (though expensive) department file server, but it's really not suitable for running a big database or doing anything mission-critical.
The xserve is decidedly NOT enterprise-grade hardware. It uses cheap, desktop-quality IDE hard drives and doesn't come with basic options like redundant power supplies and hot-plug PCI slots. Not to mention the sluggish G4 processors, the same ones as used in desktop machines. And the memory only goes up to 2GB. Excuse me, but that's not an enterprise server. That's a low-end server. Perfect for a small department server or maybe for hosting a small website.
First, we are comparing desktop upgrades here. If apple made enterprise-quality hardware, we could compare those prices, too. Since they don't, I suppose we have to stick to comparing apples-to-apples. And yes, that G4 upgrade card does cost something like $500.
Too bad they don't improve performance that much.
How many midsize or large businesses have you seen that don't use any middleware, custom, or vertical-market apps? Small businesses stay away from apple because it costs more. I thought it was self-explanatory.
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9910/21/ati.linu x.drivers.idg/
Here's a quote.
ATI Technologies on Wednesday said it will release more programming specifications for its Rage line of graphics chips
First, these are just specifications, not drivers. Second, it's probably not all of them. Third, this is for the ancient Rage cards, not the Radeon-based ones.
ATI never had open-source drivers, either.
Oh yes it does. It's not as ugly as the one on the PC (and doesn't display weird messages), but Macs certainly have one. If you want to see what it looks like, take out the hard drive(s) and power on the Mac.
I think you need to lower your expectations. Doing what you describe is pretty much impossible.
Writing compact code (usually in assembly) means said code requires top-notch programmers, has few features, takes a long time to write, is completely unmaintainable, unportable, and usually has tons of subtle bugs that take lots of time to find and exterminate. Those 4K demos are neat tricks, but they take a hell of a lot of time and resources to write. If not for the 4K limit, they could be written in one evening and have more features.
The only reason the Apple II could boot up that fast was because the OS was a piece of shit. Hell, it was hardly an OS. I would say the BIOS in your computer does five times as much as the Apple II OS. And it boots up instantly, too.
The point is, Windows XP or Linux or OpenOffice are all extremely complex programs. They do a lot of things. All of those things require programming. Furthermore, they have to be developed by a finite number of developers in a finite amount of time. A lot of times, they have to be portable from one OS or computer architecture to the next. Obviously, you can't write them in hand-coded machine language.
Finally, if you don't think that computing improved dramatically since the Apple II, why don't you keep using that machine? You seem to be happy with its efficiency and feature-completeness, right? If you think GUIs are not an important advancement, don't use them.
To sum up: most programs are slow not because of inefficiencies caused by lazy programming, but rather because of their complexity and flexibility. You can make a super-efficient program, or you can make a usable, feature-complete program. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Could I charge you for using my patent if you legally own the idea?
You can't own an idea. The closest you can come to that would be a patent. A copyright simply protects a certain chunk of text, of source code, or some other representation of an idea. If you write your own chunk of code that uses the same idea, it's yours (unless there are patents involved).
any publicity makes people think about SCO,
Well, people should be thinking about SCO once in a while. Of course, you can always live in a state of denial, but that makes you ignorant and uninformed. If you aren't reading the news about SCO, how are you going to reply to, say, your boss asking you about the lawsuit and how it relates to their Linux servers? I don't think saying "I don't care" would be very productive.
Besides, Slashdot is NOT providing publicity. It provides links to news reports in the mainstream media. Even if it didn't provide those links, people would read those reports/press releases. But then they would only see SCO's side of the story. Is that what you want?
Slashdot is not CNET, The New York Times, or Forbes. It's not giving them free publicity.
Every time we talk about them when we have nothing new to talk about, all we are doing is raising their profile.
Really? So if a newspaper prints a story about how someone is a nutcase, it raises their profile? What you are saying makes exactly zero sense.
he didn't damage the hard drive. the board failed on him,
Nope. RTFA. His POWER SUPPLY fried the HDD. I'd say it's definitely not the HD's fault it got fried. That's what I was referring to. If he had bought a better power supply, this would not have happened.
Actually, I know someone who had the exact same thing happen -- a bad PSU frying the whole system. At least in that case, it was an extremely cheap Chinese PSU that wasn't even UL-approved.
WTF are you talking about? How is an improved firmware version dishonest to the consumer? Hardware makers make revisions like that all the frigging time. Sometimes, certain parts become unavailable or too expensive so the hardware is revised to replace them. Other times, there are errors in the hardware or the firmware.
What I find more dishonest is that the asshole who wrote the article is planning to replace a drive that was damaged due to his own fault through the warranty. And then we all have to pay higher prices for HDs because assholes like him get warranty service when they aren't supposed to. I think Seagate should give him the finger instead of warranty service.
That's an improper analogy. If the code can be replaced in 4 hours, then the court will see that the code was not valuable or important and was most likely included by accident. Then, SCO won't be eligible for punitive damages. Remember: intent is very important here.
Here's a closer analogy. You borrow a pen from a co-worker. You forget to return said pen. Co-worker accuses you of theft, but refuses to say what you have stolen. I don't think the case would get very far, given that a pen hardly costs anything, the theft wasn't intentional, and you would likely return the pen had he asked.
The RDK is a reference hardware platform. Not sure if it's the same size as a PDA, but it's not an emulator.
OS/2 ran Win3.1 apps natively, so nobody wrote OS/2 apps, but Win3.1 apps.
.Net? Other than mono, of course.
If OS/2 hadn't run Windows apps, nobody would have ever used it. The reason it died was the high price and poor hardware support (it didn't run on non-IBM machines without a lot of tweaking). Stop using that example, for fuck's sake.
The lesson is that as soon as you support somebody else's standard, then nobody has any reason to use your standard.
Does linux have anything remotely resembling
Why don't you people get a clue first? No underlying Mono infrastructure is threatened by patents, since ECMA requires that all patents be licensed at no charge, and .Net is standardized with them. There are a few pieces which could potentially be patented, but their removal would not significantly harm Mono. If Microsoft still hasn't sued the Wine project, there's a very slim chance they could sue Mono.
Your other side of the argument is basically the "not invented here" thing. If Microsoft invented it, it must be bad for free software. It's not like Microsoft can force Mono to change its ways, so I fail to see your point. Mono is not a Wine clone, it's a development framework for Linux, one that could potentially be very useful for writing portable software.
I don't see anyone here bitching about Java, even though it's also a similar, proprietary technology controlled by one party -- Sun. Hell, I would say that Linux is more of a threat to Sun than Microsoft. So why isn't Java a threat to Linux?
All programs will benefit. 64 bits allows for more than 4 gigs of RAM, without the nasty paging crap. There are more registers in the CPU, so programs compiled for it will run much faster. Obviously, it's good for computationally-intensive tasks (such as video encoding or 3D graphics). There's a reason why most GPUs are 256 or 512 bits these days -- it really does help.
This is another case of the government taking community property-- in this case the airwaves-- and selling it to the highest bidder, while keeping us from using them.
The FCC exists to REGULATE airwaves. Without the FCC, the airwaves would not be usable. See below.
Yes, the FCC grants an exclusion if you'r;e under 1 watt
No, they don't. Max field strength is 250uV at 3m for an intentional radiator in the 88-108MHz band. That translates to tiny fractions of a watt.
hell the FCC isn't even constitutional-- nowhere in the constitution is the FCC given authorization. (and if it aint' authorized in the constitution, its retained by the states and people, according to the constitution.)
Your ignorance is incredible. By that logic, no federal agency is constitutional.
And finally, NO, they do NOT transmit on the same frequencies as the local radio stations--otherwise your radio would pick up the local station rather than your transmitter
A small iTrip-like transmitter can easily block out a station if it's close to the radio. At longer distances, it causes interference. And they have to transmit on the same frequencies as radio stations, since the FM band is packed in most cities. You can't transmit "between" them without causing nasty interference.
you've just provided an example of a government created problem that government pretends to cure!
You are just clueless, aren't you?
Without the FCC and their regulation of the radio spectrum, the airwaves would be completely unusable. Just look at the unlicensed bands, like 2.4GHz. Everything interferes with everything else as it is -- my phone does not work when the microwave is on, and my wi-fi card doesn't work when the phone OR the microwave is on. The only reason stuff works at all is because the FCC mandates strict power limits and band usage rules (frequency hopping, etc).
Now imagine someone transmitting a broad signal with thousands of times more power. Imagine that everybody starts doing it. Everywhere. Across the whole spectrum. With shitty equipment that emits tons of harmonics. Soon, nobody will be able to use the airwaves for anything useful due to the interference.
Sure, the FCC is somewhat corrupt. But there is no fair way to divide an extremely limited resource like the airwaves among everyone. I'd say they do a pretty damn good job as it is.
You are an idiot, Mr. AC. Satellite receivers also PASSIVELY receive broadcasts, as does cable TV and every other form of TV. Yet it's illegal to receive either satellite or cable without paying a license fee.
we get ~30 commercial free and ~100 commercial for $300-$400 a year.
It's $400 a year if you don't get any of the commercial free channels. That's what my cable company charges for basic cable + variety crap (all shitty channels full of commercials) I pay around $60/month for cable with a few premium channels (not all, though). That's over $700 per year.