Wow, that (the actual linked article) is a very stinging reply to the comment on FSF's site. It hits home (lambasting people on Slashdot for bitching before getting their facts straight) and was way overdue.
According to the article, the comment that caused such a ruckus has not been attributed to any official at FSF and not been communicated to Apache by the FSF.
Somehow it leaves me feeling a little uneasy, though. I bet I'd be influenced by the same or similar tactics, even though I've read this article. It leaves my ego a bit worse for the wear to know that I (hell, we!) am so easily swayed by savvy marketing techniques.
Example: even if janet jackson winds up paying fines for her Super Bowl stunt, I'll bet she gets exactly what she intended in terms of sales and publicity. The people she pissed off were never her customers anyway.
A few years ago, I had this nagging, on-again, off-again, sharpish pain in my lower abdominal region, a little to the side (sound familiar yet?). That afternoon, I went to see my general practitioner. He referred me to a urologist whom I saw the next day. He did a variety of tests, including X-rays and ultra-sound and recommended copious quantities of water until I passed the stone(s) and prescribed equal water consumption thereafter.
About a week later, I gave a painful birth to a very pointy crystaline monolith. I followed up with my urologist.
If I had needed the ultra-sonic, litho-whatever (breaking up stones with sound waves), a mobile unit comes to my town's hospital on a scheduled basis.
No delays, no waiting, no hassles (other than the obvious). Oh, and my insurance convered all but the deductables.
Say, perhaps HMO's are what suck... a little too much like the UK system, eh?
There's enough prior art here to toss in out, IMO.
While it's a common practice for these patent vultures to prey on the small, cash poor "infringers", counting on a quick settlement, I don't understand why they'd tackle microsoft. MSFT has the legal guns to back this thing all the way to invalidation of the patent, if they want. I guess they might just figure it's cheaper to fork over a pay-off, but I wouldn't and I doubt Mssr. Gates will, either.
I assume that she's an average user? Maybe she's a little more intellectually active and can better form her own judgements than the average (l)user. Anyway, it's still encouraging.
I sincerely hope Firefox proves out. I've not tried it yet; still using Mozilla here. I have preferred Moz over IE for its extra features (anti-popup, image blocking, etc) but its bloat is pretty much on par with IE, IMO. I'd certainly like something that offers the best features of both in a tamer package.
I guess I'd better stop wondering and give Firefox a try.
Functionality is the key, not the license the OS is distributed under.
I couldn't agree more. I'd like to go a bit further, though, and say that functionality on a wide variety of handheld and embedded devices also means modularity, even down to the level of the kernel.
I'm not dissing Linux here, but from what I've seen so far, Linux still has a pretty large footprint until you really start hacking (in the machette sense of the word).
The closest I've seen to what I consider ideal is QNX which has a micro-kernel that is inherently modular. Use only what you need and even swap portions in and out at runtime if necessary. However, QNX licensing, last time I checked, was pretty damned steep and the developer seats were outta sight for a small-time developer.
The 'stacking' description immediately made me think of 'prior art'. I recall articles back in the '80's on how to double the RAM in Apples and other microcomputers by stacking more DIP RAM IC's atop the existing ones and running wires for the additional address lines.
So then I skimmed through the patent referenced... to be honest, I didn't study it in detail, but I'm left confused. I didn't see anything in to that had much to do with stacking memory IC's. In fact, I honestly don't see *what* they have patented.
It's probably just another overly broad patent with the purpose of scaring up some license payments.
Well, in terms of permission, they don't have mine. Here's the comment I send them:
I am a space and technology enthusiast. I follow the Mars Rover missions daily. I use a scanning receiver to collect images from LEO weather satellites.
Having put my technological bent in perspective, I do not see any significant technological, cultural or political returns in the foreseeable for manned missions to the moon or mars. I also do not believe that we will be in a position to recover for our use any natural resources from outside our bioshpere, even given advancements in spaceflight that might come from such endeavors... the cost economics will disprove the feasibility.
I am, however, in full support of smaller scale, lower cost exploratory probes to destinations of interest within our solar system such as the Mars Rovers. Such missions are more like to be scientifically productive and may allow us to identify targets of actual value that may justify the effort of manned missions in the future.
A little OT here, but how many here were forced to read Chaucer's _Cantebury Tales_ in highschool/grammar school?
I was, and found nothing warrant any excitement... until, years later, I stumbled upon a copy that had it in both modern English and middle English. Reading it in the original form was fun and interesting! Having the modern version to refer to for odd words helped me enjoy it even more.
Hams are more concerned about the interference issue than the health risks, and rightly so. The potential health hazards created by modulating the power lines should be minimal, assuming the level of modulation is kept reasonably low.
The interference caused to more traditional RF communications is likely to be significant because you are, in effect, stringing miles and miles of antenae across the countryside. The best bet might be to modulate on bands that are presently home to digital communication and in coordination with those present modulation schemes such that they don't interfere with each other.
I suspect the whole issue may be moot, as I doubt that BPL will ever see a largescale rollout for other technical reasons besides these.
There is a significant difference between what's happening in computer security and the potato famine. They didn't know any better than to farm without diversity at the time. We've learned a great deal about agriculture and soil conservation since then... the famine itself was one large, nasty lesson.
The big difference wrt computer security is that we *do* know better and are still failing to get it right! The phone "Phreaks" from decades past should have taught us a lesson (not to mention the telco's of the time). The Morris Worm should have been a giant, looming reminder of security and secure programming practices and the internet became more ubiquitous and our economic dependence on it greater... but we (producers of software everywhere) still keep f-ing it up!
The writing is on the wall, has been there for a long time and it needs to be heeded.
Computers will be everywhere and the will all talk to each other all of the time. That is all they are talking about...
OK, I'll grant that. But I still assert that, for the most part, they haven't a clue how to leverage that into a product or service.
What scares me more than just a bit is that the most likely organization to have more than just a nebulous idea of how to capitalize on it would be Microsoft.
If they can't describe it in real world, understandable terms, it's either pseudo-marketing babble or some ethereal, vapor-concept whom the perveyors of can't quite wrap their minds around themselves. In either case, they need to put up or shut up. I'm grow weary of it.
Do you know if eCos can do hard real-time? Or how it compares to linux kernels in this respect?
What are the free options for hard real-time?
I don't know about eCos, but hard realtime for Linux can be had using RTLinux.
It is a sort of kernel that lies between the hardware and the real Linux kernel. It has its own API for the hard realtime functions and leaves the Linux kernel API alone.
As a regular EETimes reader, I have to agree with your post.
And... as a developer of and for embedded systems since 1986, I have a little insight on the issue. For the record, we use a proprietary OS in our (1) deeply embedded systems, ROM-DOS on some (2) lightweight PC platform embedded systems and Windows 2000+ on (3) MMI (Man Machine Interface) systems.
We have investigated using RTLinux in the first 2 cases and found the footprint/overhead to be far too great for item (1).
For item (2), we're not sure. The overhead and learning curve have kept us away for the time being, though we're interested in the capability advantage over ROM-DOS. Two very nice things about ROM-DOS: It can have a _very_ small footprint (as little as about 4K to 6K in ROM IIRC) and it's only $25 per runtime license (at least at our negotiated quantities).
For item 3 (yeah I know, it's not really an embedded system) we would love to use Linux (not necessarily RTLinux), but our customers demand Windows workability (desktop apps, Excel, Access, Oracle databases, etc).
So, in our outfit, we only use Linux (Red Hat) for a file server with Samba (to avoid a Windows Server license).
I hate to do this, but since you were playing grammar nazi...
learnt is an acceptable, although of Commonwealth usage and possibly a little archaic, spelling of the past tense of the verb learn. Look it up in the dictionary if you must.
I'm an Okie, born and raised in the country, and I know what mudbogging is. George Bush is not known for an interest in 'bogging. G.B. _is_ known for an interest in oil and exploiting petroleum resources. Mud-logging is an esoteric term, I know, but has a much better tie-in IMO.
Before I re-read your post, I thought it made sense as a joke. I thought you said 'mudlogging', which is to analyse the petroleum content in the mud extracted from oil wells during the drilling process. So let's try it again...
The rover may soon be the first to go mud-logging on Mars... So that is why Bush wants to go to Mars.
I wasn't kidding about the "tape on glasses" effect of my patch job.
I used wide-mesh fiberglass tape on top of a thin coat of epoxy, followed by another epoxy layer on each hinge. Not a repair that's expected to impress anyone but the occassional nerd.
I've often said that the difference between country boys and city boys is the difference between bailing wire and duct tape... it takes epoxy to rise above those two and distinguish oneself as a geek.
I usually take another chunk of plastic then fireup the soldering iron...
I've tried that, to no avail, quite a few times. Epoxy rules... and it's fumes don't burn out quite as many neurons as do the fumes from burning plastic.
I think you've got it wrong. They should be turning over to IBM their discovery documents today, but we won't likely know anything about it until the next scheduled court date, Jan 23.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that (the actual linked article) is a very stinging reply to the comment on FSF's site. It hits home (lambasting people on Slashdot for bitching before getting their facts straight) and was way overdue.
According to the article, the comment that caused such a ruckus has not been attributed to any official at FSF and not been communicated to Apache by the FSF.
...and damned good marketing too.
Somehow it leaves me feeling a little uneasy, though. I bet I'd be influenced by the same or similar tactics, even though I've read this article. It leaves my ego a bit worse for the wear to know that I (hell, we!) am so easily swayed by savvy marketing techniques.
Example: even if janet jackson winds up paying fines for her Super Bowl stunt, I'll bet she gets exactly what she intended in terms of sales and publicity. The people she pissed off were never her customers anyway.
That's just strange.
A few years ago, I had this nagging, on-again, off-again, sharpish pain in my lower abdominal region, a little to the side (sound familiar yet?). That afternoon, I went to see my general practitioner. He referred me to a urologist whom I saw the next day. He did a variety of tests, including X-rays and ultra-sound and recommended copious quantities of water until I passed the stone(s) and prescribed equal water consumption thereafter.
About a week later, I gave a painful birth to a very pointy crystaline monolith. I followed up with my urologist.
If I had needed the ultra-sonic, litho-whatever (breaking up stones with sound waves), a mobile unit comes to my town's hospital on a scheduled basis.
No delays, no waiting, no hassles (other than the obvious). Oh, and my insurance convered all but the deductables.
Say, perhaps HMO's are what suck... a little too much like the UK system, eh?
There's enough prior art here to toss in out, IMO.
While it's a common practice for these patent vultures to prey on the small, cash poor "infringers", counting on a quick settlement, I don't understand why they'd tackle microsoft. MSFT has the legal guns to back this thing all the way to invalidation of the patent, if they want. I guess they might just figure it's cheaper to fork over a pay-off, but I wouldn't and I doubt Mssr. Gates will, either.
I assume that she's an average user? Maybe she's a little more intellectually active and can better form her own judgements than the average (l)user. Anyway, it's still encouraging.
I sincerely hope Firefox proves out. I've not tried it yet; still using Mozilla here. I have preferred Moz over IE for its extra features (anti-popup, image blocking, etc) but its bloat is pretty much on par with IE, IMO. I'd certainly like something that offers the best features of both in a tamer package.
I guess I'd better stop wondering and give Firefox a try.
Functionality is the key, not the license the OS is distributed under.
I couldn't agree more. I'd like to go a bit further, though, and say that functionality on a wide variety of handheld and embedded devices also means modularity, even down to the level of the kernel.
I'm not dissing Linux here, but from what I've seen so far, Linux still has a pretty large footprint until you really start hacking (in the machette sense of the word).
The closest I've seen to what I consider ideal is QNX which has a micro-kernel that is inherently modular. Use only what you need and even swap portions in and out at runtime if necessary. However, QNX licensing, last time I checked, was pretty damned steep and the developer seats were outta sight for a small-time developer.
Speaking of patents...
The 'stacking' description immediately made me think of 'prior art'. I recall articles back in the '80's on how to double the RAM in Apples and other microcomputers by stacking more DIP RAM IC's atop the existing ones and running wires for the additional address lines.
So then I skimmed through the patent referenced... to be honest, I didn't study it in detail, but I'm left confused. I didn't see anything in to that had much to do with stacking memory IC's. In fact, I honestly don't see *what* they have patented.
It's probably just another overly broad patent with the purpose of scaring up some license payments.
Well, in terms of permission, they don't have mine. Here's the comment I send them:
I am a space and technology enthusiast. I follow the Mars Rover missions daily. I use a scanning receiver to collect images from LEO weather satellites.
Having put my technological bent in perspective, I do not see any significant technological, cultural or political returns in the foreseeable for manned missions to the moon or mars. I also do not believe that we will be in a position to recover for our use any natural resources from outside our bioshpere, even given advancements in spaceflight that might come from such endeavors... the cost economics will disprove the feasibility.
I am, however, in full support of smaller scale, lower cost exploratory probes to destinations of interest within our solar system such as the Mars Rovers. Such missions are more like to be scientifically productive and may allow us to identify targets of actual value that may justify the effort of manned missions in the future.
Arg! Where's the bloody price?
Between two distributors, GeekZone and the manufacturer's sites, I can't find anything but "It's cost effective".
Would this set me back $200 to $400 or are we talking a grand or more?
A little OT here, but how many here were forced to read Chaucer's _Cantebury Tales_ in highschool/grammar school?
I was, and found nothing warrant any excitement... until, years later, I stumbled upon a copy that had it in both modern English and middle English. Reading it in the original form was fun and interesting! Having the modern version to refer to for odd words helped me enjoy it even more.
Hams are more concerned about the interference issue than the health risks, and rightly so. The potential health hazards created by modulating the power lines should be minimal, assuming the level of modulation is kept reasonably low.
The interference caused to more traditional RF communications is likely to be significant because you are, in effect, stringing miles and miles of antenae across the countryside. The best bet might be to modulate on bands that are presently home to digital communication and in coordination with those present modulation schemes such that they don't interfere with each other.
I suspect the whole issue may be moot, as I doubt that BPL will ever see a largescale rollout for other technical reasons besides these.
There is a significant difference between what's happening in computer security and the potato famine. They didn't know any better than to farm without diversity at the time. We've learned a great deal about agriculture and soil conservation since then... the famine itself was one large, nasty lesson.
The big difference wrt computer security is that we *do* know better and are still failing to get it right! The phone "Phreaks" from decades past should have taught us a lesson (not to mention the telco's of the time). The Morris Worm should have been a giant, looming reminder of security and secure programming practices and the internet became more ubiquitous and our economic dependence on it greater... but we (producers of software everywhere) still keep f-ing it up!
The writing is on the wall, has been there for a long time and it needs to be heeded.
Computers will be everywhere and the will all talk to each other all of the time. That is all they are talking about...
OK, I'll grant that. But I still assert that, for the most part, they haven't a clue how to leverage that into a product or service.
What scares me more than just a bit is that the most likely organization to have more than just a nebulous idea of how to capitalize on it would be Microsoft.
If they can't describe it in real world, understandable terms, it's either pseudo-marketing babble or some ethereal, vapor-concept whom the perveyors of can't quite wrap their minds around themselves. In either case, they need to put up or shut up. I'm grow weary of it.
Do you know if eCos can do hard real-time? Or how it compares to linux kernels in this respect?
What are the free options for hard real-time?
I don't know about eCos, but hard realtime for Linux can be had using RTLinux.
It is a sort of kernel that lies between the hardware and the real Linux kernel. It has its own API for the hard realtime functions and leaves the Linux kernel API alone.
Whoops!
On the ROM-DOS footprint, the 4K to 6K is for the mini-BIOS. The ROM-DOS min size is probably more like 30 to 40K, depending on options.
As a regular EETimes reader, I have to agree with your post.
And... as a developer of and for embedded systems since 1986, I have a little insight on the issue. For the record, we use a proprietary OS in our (1) deeply embedded systems, ROM-DOS on some (2) lightweight PC platform embedded systems and Windows 2000+ on (3) MMI (Man Machine Interface) systems.
We have investigated using RTLinux in the first 2 cases and found the footprint/overhead to be far too great for item (1).
For item (2), we're not sure. The overhead and learning curve have kept us away for the time being, though we're interested in the capability advantage over ROM-DOS. Two very nice things about ROM-DOS: It can have a _very_ small footprint (as little as about 4K to 6K in ROM IIRC) and it's only $25 per runtime license (at least at our negotiated quantities).
For item 3 (yeah I know, it's not really an embedded system) we would love to use Linux (not necessarily RTLinux), but our customers demand Windows workability (desktop apps, Excel, Access, Oracle databases, etc).
So, in our outfit, we only use Linux (Red Hat) for a file server with Samba (to avoid a Windows Server license).
I hate to do this, but since you were playing grammar nazi...
learnt is an acceptable, although of Commonwealth usage and possibly a little archaic, spelling of the past tense of the verb learn. Look it up in the dictionary if you must.
Bit Torrent link, please?
I'd setup a tracker once I get'm down, but I'm behind a NAT box.
Good Lord.
I'm an Okie, born and raised in the country, and I know what mudbogging is. George Bush is not known for an interest in 'bogging. G.B. _is_ known for an interest in oil and exploiting petroleum resources. Mud-logging is an esoteric term, I know, but has a much better tie-in IMO.
Before I re-read your post, I thought it made sense as a joke. I thought you said 'mudlogging', which is to analyse the petroleum content in the mud extracted from oil wells during the drilling process. So let's try it again...
The rover may soon be the first to go mud-logging on Mars... So that is why Bush wants to go to Mars.
It doesn't actually look too bad.
I wasn't kidding about the "tape on glasses" effect of my patch job.
I used wide-mesh fiberglass tape on top of a thin coat of epoxy, followed by another epoxy layer on each hinge. Not a repair that's expected to impress anyone but the occassional nerd.
I've often said that the difference between country boys and city boys is the difference between bailing wire and duct tape... it takes epoxy to rise above those two and distinguish oneself as a geek.
I usually take another chunk of plastic then fireup the soldering iron...
I've tried that, to no avail, quite a few times. Epoxy rules... and it's fumes don't burn out quite as many neurons as do the fumes from burning plastic.
I think you've got it wrong. They should be turning over to IBM their discovery documents today, but we won't likely know anything about it until the next scheduled court date, Jan 23.
Check this article at groklaw
Nope. I've carried it through airport security many times, even after 9/11 with no complaints or extra attention.
The explosives sniffers/analyzers are tuned to very fine spectrums of chemical fingerprint.