Quite a few comments on this page explain different technical "solutions" to the distribution of source code. But the problem is not a technical problem. I'm sure your decision to release or not release the source was not done for technical reasons, but for commercial and legal reasons. And that's how you have to fix your licensing problem.. Through a propre contract and by being ready to enforce your contract terms. Maybe have the contract say that the customer has to provide you any change he made to the application, allowing you to do audits, etc. And be ready to sue if they do something not allowed.
I just dont get why multi-million dollar visualisation equipement create better research. And I've work in a HPC research center where we have a very nice 3D screen powered by a massive SGI.. And never saw it used to any significant research, sure its a nice toy and its a nice way to blow research dollars. But what a waste. And anyways, most of the time, most researchers where doing their visuation in their offices with their PCs and nvidia/ati cards and their consumer grade crts.. And I'm sure they could see plenty.
See Discreet's website and you'll notice that Flame, Inferno and Fire still run on ONLY SGI hardware. SGI InfiniteReality boards are used as image generators for flight military flight simulators and also to drive the Inferno compositing and film mastering, using up to 32 film resolution layers and 10-bit anti-aliased graphics
This is no longer true. Discreet has now ported all of their software to Linux PCs. Even the Inferno (which was the last). I was at NAB last week (major tradeshow for the media business) and they were showing the Inferno PC. There was no SGI left in the Autodesk/Discreet booth. The inferno/flame is now an IBM (Lenovo?) PC with an Nvidia Quatro, a DVS board (for video acquisition), dual-core cpu, lots of ram, and a fiberchannel raid array. The Flame has been a PC for a long time (at least a year) and the Flint for maybe 2 years. And yes the DVS board can do two stream at 4:4:4. And I've been reading of the possibility of making a laptop version of flint... (because they are getting bitten really hard by Final Cut Pro and Shake and other PC/Mac apps...)
If you search on A9.com.. you get a nice "Web Results by Windows Live".... So yes, they did dump Google, strange idea, why go for an inferior search engine?
'm not suprised because I've never really seem the appeal of hard-core gaming. Sure, a game can be a nice distraction once in a while, just as a movie can. But in the long run, stimulating activities (books, athletics, social interactions, programming) are always more interesting.
Why do you think that passively reading a book is a stimulating activity, while actively participating in a game isn't. This is complete crap. That said, programming is just a big game (but I actually get paid to do it..... and NOT to post on/. )!
I'll further your comments by saying that there are a lot of shit books being published, just like there are a lot of shit games.
But there are a lot more good books than good games, simply because there are very few classic games that keep value after their "tech peek" (like Tetris).. But there are lots of good books that were written a long time ago that are still interesting... The library is just larger.
What makes you think that? I mean, sure, he stated that he wants to get releases out quicker, but that doesn't necessarily mean he will be able to. I imagine that has more to do with the independent, unpaid Debian developers rather than the project leader.
Unlike the equally unpaid Gentoo Developers who manage to make 2 releases every year, and at point even did 4 (but that was, i admit, too much work).
QNX has a really nice structure, they have two co-founders. One is the CEO and one is chairman of the Board and they switch every year, but they really run the company together. You can do that, and have you has CTO and your friend as CFO (titles you'd keep).. Titles like Chairman and CTO, and CEO/CFO are really cool.
they have 104 servers... that's almost 1GB/s/server... that's a lot.. and they have 4 raid controlers per server.. that means each raid controler does around 250 mb/s.. (which normal for a high end raid controler) and they are connected with a 10gb/s interconnect (probably infiniband or 10G ethernet). So the whole thing is not that hard to do if you use your servers properly.
But they have 1000 clients.. so its only 100MB/s/client.. so 1Gbps/s/client.. so the clients are probably gigabit ethernet... Otherwise they could do much more... I've seen other cluster file systems do 600MB/s/client, its not that impressive. It only shows that IBM has a huge budget and they can afford lots of hardware.
This is like saying, NASA builds huge rocket for many many billions of dollars. Its just of matter of cash, not of great technical prowness.
If we do a dollar count.. lets say 10k$/server * 104 = 1M$ + 25k$/storage controler w/ disks * 416 = 10M$ + 2k$/client * 1000 = 2M$, plus the switches etc... give me 30M$ and I can do the same thing.
Btw, I work on a cluster filesystem, that performance is not that hard to achieve if you have that kind of hardware.
Although Pascal is fine language. It has been mostly superceded by the C-syntax languages. Its an evolutionary dead end. Only Ada and Delphi are still being somehow developed. They dont have nearly the same level of tools are C-syntax languages (C, C++, Java, C#, etc)
It has never been a good beginner's language.. I truly really recommend a C-family language. Why? Because most of today's popular languages are in the family (C, C++, Java, C#, etc). C++ is way over complicated for a first language. I would really recommend that you start with old fashioned C. Yes, its not object oriented, but it forces you to focus on the basic thing, OO is just a way to pack code together, its not a defining property of the language.. Then you can easily learn C++, Java, C#..
If you really want to start with a OO language, pick Java or C#.. But be warned, those are dynamic languages (Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Python, Javascript, etc) and they have some differences compared to "hard-compiled" languages like C. C forces you to understand how the computer works, and it will always help afterwards to know that. Python is also a good beginner's language, its clear, clean, easy to learn, easy to use. Stay away from Perl and PHP, they are very easy to use.. but they teach bad habits.
And VB is badly considered not because the language sucks (and it did suck last time I used it.. but that was many years ago), but because most VB programmers suck and are not very good. Often not formally trained and they dont really understand many important concepts. Its fine if you want to cook for you familly, but that's not how you cook for a large restaurant. A good formally trained programmer should be able to pick up any not-to-weird language in very little time (since they all have basicly the same concepts)... VB programmers most often can't. Where I work, I have to handle C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, having a good base is important. The concepts are important, the syntax is just a tool. Get a good tool, dump VB.
I'm a bit special because I had my first job in the computer business when I was 15 (as a low low level tech).. And I already had experience before starting university. But still, I landed my current job through a summer job. On a 4 yr program, I did 2 summer jobs and 1 internship (the only difference being that the internship gives me a credit and cost me 300$). You should ask for a salary, dont go too much under 13-15$/hr. Not asking enough looks bad (employers know good candidates are expensive). That said, most employers dont expect interns/students to be productive, they are mostly given stuff that "would be cool if it was done, but we'll live without it". Internships are a great way to test a potential recruit, its pretty cheap and the intern will go away in 4 or 8 months, and then you are completely free to ignore him or offer him a better job.
Where I work, I did an internship doing php/mysql/perl in the systems (sysadmin) departement, and ended up getting a job as a software developer for a distributed filesystem (how cool is that!!).
Did I say not to worry about having no experience? No sane employer expects first year interns to have experience. And if you arent in a desert, it should be pretty easy to find something, most school have a service to help you find one. And the current economy is very good in the IT sector.
If you find nothing, look for something in research (it looks good on a resumé too), most professors hire student (but its badly paid!). Just look at the list of profs in your department/school and look at those that seem most interesting and go see them, they love it when students are interested in what they do. This obviously only apply to universitys where research is done.
The Copyright Board of Canada last week released its proposed tariff for 2007 for the private copying levy. The numbers remain unchanged: 21 cents per CD-R. As prices have dropped, however, the levy now frequently comprises a significant percentage of the retail price. Consider the purchase of 100 blank Maxell CDs. Future Shop retails the 100 CDs for $69.99. The breakdown of this sale is $48.99 for the CDs and $21.00 for the levy (even worse is a current Future Shop deal of 200 blank CD-Rs from HP, which retails for $59.99. The levy alone on this sale is $42.00 (200 CDs x 21 cents/CD) which leaves the consumers paying $17.99 for the CDs and $42.00 for the levy).
This results in a huge distortion in retail pricing when compared to the U.S. market which does not have a levy system. For example, the same Maxell CDs retail for US$34.99 at CompUSA. When you add in the exchange differential, the Canadian cost is just over $40.00. Obviously the price is slightly lower in the US even without the levy (35 cents per CD vs. 40 cents per CD). With the levy, the price increases by another 50 percent.
Given how little Canadians get for their money (the private copying right doesn't cover copying CDs to Apple iPods) is it any wonder that countries such as Australia are considering allowing for such private copying without a levy scheme? The solution in Canada is obvious: either ensure that the levy covers the full panoply of private copying as is the case in France or drop the levy altogether and institute a fair use user right.
Bell labs was a patent factory, they invested billions a year on research. Bell labs is an example of how the system is meant to work. Spend a non trivial amount on research, get a limited term monopoly in the invention in return.
But this is phone company AT&T, the Bell Labs are now part of a different company (called Lucent) who own the patents, etc.. So this probably has no relation to Bell Labs... AT&T isn't even AT&T anymore, its SBC that changed its name.. and as those on their part of the world knows, they are not nice people.. more like money thirsthy capitalists..
I mean... I guess it makes sense. But I don't see how defending patent = losing customers
I suggest you visit a nice Utah corp called SCO.. alright they have no patents.. imagine if they did..
I think the main reason is that it takes the focus of the company's management off building products, selling/supporting them and puts it on lawsuits..
probably because more on-core would increase the die size.. and therefore increase the production cost. And keeping the cost down is pretty important for mass electronics like that. And 1mb of on-core cache is quite a lot.
And I'm ready to guess that this chip is much much cheaper that any UltraSparc (modern or ancient)
I'll keep my Free (as in speech) community supported operating system.
Its funny how the ad supported idea comes back every once in a while. I remember the ad supported ISPs like Netzero... wasn't a great success. People dont want so many ads.
My best advice is to use your right to private copying if you live in a country where such a right exists (like Canada or France). If you don't, I'd recommend either civil disobedience (doing it anyways) or political action (get elected to the US Congress and fix it;)
There are many good peer-to-peer networks where you can get music for free without restrictions or lock-in. I have an iPod, but all of my music was acquired using my right to private copying.
Gaming is fairly big in SK also, somehow I think 'it runs on WINE' isn't going to fly.
But it runs on the Playstation probably is.. Its also a huge market for games, so this might make people write/port their games to non-Microsoft operation systems..
I'm really curious to see if Blizzard will change its decision.. I believe in the power of the media (they did get Nixon..). When I have something that bothers me, I get on my soapbox (my blog) and I talk about it... And since very few people read it, it doesnt do much. When Taco gets on his big soapbox.. I'm sure his voice his heard like thunder at Blizzard.. and anywhere inside this industry. In every company where I worked, most techies read slashdot.. Because like it or not, hundreds of thousands of readers will read this, including many many of their customers.
This fight over the control of the DNS system really is part of a greater problem that the US has.. This week, UNESCO adopted a convention on cultural diversity, which basicly excludes "cultural industries" and "cultural products" from free trade agreements. Of the 150 countries that voted on it, 148 voted in favor, 2 voted against (the USA and Israel). Its interesting to note that this convention was not spearheaded by Iran or China.. but by France, Canada and the UK, the USA's closest allies.
Be careful, the world can live without US control!
Slashdot Mirror
Is it something that was developped by Writely that Google bought or was it developped independently by Google? Any Googler here can disclose that?
Quite a few comments on this page explain different technical "solutions" to the distribution of source code. But the problem is not a technical problem. I'm sure your decision to release or not release the source was not done for technical reasons, but for commercial and legal reasons. And that's how you have to fix your licensing problem.. Through a propre contract and by being ready to enforce your contract terms. Maybe have the contract say that the customer has to provide you any change he made to the application, allowing you to do audits, etc. And be ready to sue if they do something not allowed.
Talk to your friendly lawyer...
I suppose Debian has only accepted it into non-free?
I just dont get why multi-million dollar visualisation equipement create better research. And I've work in a HPC research center where we have a very nice 3D screen powered by a massive SGI.. And never saw it used to any significant research, sure its a nice toy and its a nice way to blow research dollars. But what a waste. And anyways, most of the time, most researchers where doing their visuation in their offices with their PCs and nvidia/ati cards and their consumer grade crts.. And I'm sure they could see plenty.
This is no longer true. Discreet has now ported all of their software to Linux PCs. Even the Inferno (which was the last). I was at NAB last week (major tradeshow for the media business) and they were showing the Inferno PC. There was no SGI left in the Autodesk/Discreet booth. The inferno/flame is now an IBM (Lenovo?) PC with an Nvidia Quatro, a DVS board (for video acquisition), dual-core cpu, lots of ram, and a fiberchannel raid array. The Flame has been a PC for a long time (at least a year) and the Flint for maybe 2 years. And yes the DVS board can do two stream at 4:4:4. And I've been reading of the possibility of making a laptop version of flint... (because they are getting bitten really hard by Final Cut Pro and Shake and other PC/Mac apps...)
If you search on A9.com.. you get a nice "Web Results by Windows Live".... So yes, they did dump Google, strange idea, why go for an inferior search engine?
Why do you think that passively reading a book is a stimulating activity, while actively participating in a game isn't. This is complete crap. That said, programming is just a big game (but I actually get paid to do it..... and NOT to post on /. )!
But there are a lot more good books than good games, simply because there are very few classic games that keep value after their "tech peek" (like Tetris).. But there are lots of good books that were written a long time ago that are still interesting... The library is just larger.
Unlike the equally unpaid Gentoo Developers who manage to make 2 releases every year, and at point even did 4 (but that was, i admit, too much work).
QNX has a really nice structure, they have two co-founders. One is the CEO and one is chairman of the Board and they switch every year, but they really run the company together. You can do that, and have you has CTO and your friend as CFO (titles you'd keep).. Titles like Chairman and CTO, and CEO/CFO are really cool.
Can anyone with a Pacer account get the complaint full text ?
they have 104 servers... that's almost 1GB/s/server ... that's a lot.. and they have 4 raid controlers per server.. that means each raid controler does around 250 mb/s.. (which normal for a high end raid controler) and they are connected with a 10gb/s interconnect (probably infiniband or 10G ethernet). So the whole thing is not that hard to do if you use your servers properly.
But they have 1000 clients.. so its only 100MB/s/client.. so 1Gbps/s/client.. so the clients are probably gigabit ethernet... Otherwise they could do much more... I've seen other cluster file systems do 600MB/s/client, its not that impressive. It only shows that IBM has a huge budget and they can afford lots of hardware.
This is like saying, NASA builds huge rocket for many many billions of dollars. Its just of matter of cash, not of great technical prowness.
If we do a dollar count.. lets say 10k$/server * 104 = 1M$ + 25k$/storage controler w/ disks * 416 = 10M$ + 2k$/client * 1000 = 2M$, plus the switches etc... give me 30M$ and I can do the same thing.
Btw, I work on a cluster filesystem, that performance is not that hard to achieve if you have that kind of hardware.
GPFS is a cluster file system.. its in a completely different category.
Although Pascal is fine language. It has been mostly superceded by the C-syntax languages. Its an evolutionary dead end. Only Ada and Delphi are still being somehow developed. They dont have nearly the same level of tools are C-syntax languages (C, C++, Java, C#, etc)
It has never been a good beginner's language.. I truly really recommend a C-family language. Why? Because most of today's popular languages are in the family (C, C++, Java, C#, etc). C++ is way over complicated for a first language. I would really recommend that you start with old fashioned C. Yes, its not object oriented, but it forces you to focus on the basic thing, OO is just a way to pack code together, its not a defining property of the language.. Then you can easily learn C++, Java, C#..
If you really want to start with a OO language, pick Java or C#.. But be warned, those are dynamic languages (Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Python, Javascript, etc) and they have some differences compared to "hard-compiled" languages like C. C forces you to understand how the computer works, and it will always help afterwards to know that. Python is also a good beginner's language, its clear, clean, easy to learn, easy to use. Stay away from Perl and PHP, they are very easy to use.. but they teach bad habits.
And VB is badly considered not because the language sucks (and it did suck last time I used it.. but that was many years ago), but because most VB programmers suck and are not very good. Often not formally trained and they dont really understand many important concepts. Its fine if you want to cook for you familly, but that's not how you cook for a large restaurant. A good formally trained programmer should be able to pick up any not-to-weird language in very little time (since they all have basicly the same concepts)... VB programmers most often can't. Where I work, I have to handle C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, having a good base is important. The concepts are important, the syntax is just a tool. Get a good tool, dump VB.
I'm a bit special because I had my first job in the computer business when I was 15 (as a low low level tech).. And I already had experience before starting university. But still, I landed my current job through a summer job. On a 4 yr program, I did 2 summer jobs and 1 internship (the only difference being that the internship gives me a credit and cost me 300$). You should ask for a salary, dont go too much under 13-15$/hr. Not asking enough looks bad (employers know good candidates are expensive). That said, most employers dont expect interns/students to be productive, they are mostly given stuff that "would be cool if it was done, but we'll live without it". Internships are a great way to test a potential recruit, its pretty cheap and the intern will go away in 4 or 8 months, and then you are completely free to ignore him or offer him a better job.
Where I work, I did an internship doing php/mysql/perl in the systems (sysadmin) departement, and ended up getting a job as a software developer for a distributed filesystem (how cool is that!!).
Did I say not to worry about having no experience? No sane employer expects first year interns to have experience. And if you arent in a desert, it should be pretty easy to find something, most school have a service to help you find one. And the current economy is very good in the IT sector.
If you find nothing, look for something in research (it looks good on a resumé too), most professors hire student (but its badly paid!). Just look at the list of profs in your department/school and look at those that seem most interesting and go see them, they love it when students are interested in what they do. This obviously only apply to universitys where research is done.
The Private Copying Levy Distortion
The Copyright Board of Canada last week released its proposed tariff for 2007 for the private copying levy. The numbers remain unchanged: 21 cents per CD-R. As prices have dropped, however, the levy now frequently comprises a significant percentage of the retail price. Consider the purchase of 100 blank Maxell CDs. Future Shop retails the 100 CDs for $69.99. The breakdown of this sale is $48.99 for the CDs and $21.00 for the levy (even worse is a current Future Shop deal of 200 blank CD-Rs from HP, which retails for $59.99. The levy alone on this sale is $42.00 (200 CDs x 21 cents/CD) which leaves the consumers paying $17.99 for the CDs and $42.00 for the levy).
This results in a huge distortion in retail pricing when compared to the U.S. market which does not have a levy system. For example, the same Maxell CDs retail for US$34.99 at CompUSA. When you add in the exchange differential, the Canadian cost is just over $40.00. Obviously the price is slightly lower in the US even without the levy (35 cents per CD vs. 40 cents per CD). With the levy, the price increases by another 50 percent.
Given how little Canadians get for their money (the private copying right doesn't cover copying CDs to Apple iPods) is it any wonder that countries such as Australia are considering allowing for such private copying without a levy scheme? The solution in Canada is obvious: either ensure that the levy covers the full panoply of private copying as is the case in France or drop the levy altogether and institute a fair use user right.
Bell labs was a patent factory, they invested billions a year on research. Bell labs is an example of how the system is meant to work. Spend a non trivial amount on research, get a limited term monopoly in the invention in return.
But this is phone company AT&T, the Bell Labs are now part of a different company (called Lucent) who own the patents, etc.. So this probably has no relation to Bell Labs... AT&T isn't even AT&T anymore, its SBC that changed its name.. and as those on their part of the world knows, they are not nice people.. more like money thirsthy capitalists..
I mean... I guess it makes sense. But I don't see how defending patent = losing customers
I suggest you visit a nice Utah corp called SCO.. alright they have no patents.. imagine if they did..
I think the main reason is that it takes the focus of the company's management off building products, selling/supporting them and puts it on lawsuits..
probably because more on-core would increase the die size.. and therefore increase the production cost. And keeping the cost down is pretty important for mass electronics like that. And 1mb of on-core cache is quite a lot.
And I'm ready to guess that this chip is much much cheaper that any UltraSparc (modern or ancient)
I'll keep my Free (as in speech) community supported operating system.
Its funny how the ad supported idea comes back every once in a while. I remember the ad supported ISPs like Netzero... wasn't a great success. People dont want so many ads.
My best advice is to use your right to private copying if you live in a country where such a right exists (like Canada or France). If you don't, I'd recommend either civil disobedience (doing it anyways) or political action (get elected to the US Congress and fix it ;)
There are many good peer-to-peer networks where you can get music for free without restrictions or lock-in. I have an iPod, but all of my music was acquired using my right to private copying.
Gaming is fairly big in SK also, somehow I think 'it runs on WINE' isn't going to fly.
But it runs on the Playstation probably is.. Its also a huge market for games, so this might make people write/port their games to non-Microsoft operation systems..
I'm really curious to see if Blizzard will change its decision.. I believe in the power of the media (they did get Nixon..). When I have something that bothers me, I get on my soapbox (my blog) and I talk about it... And since very few people read it, it doesnt do much. When Taco gets on his big soapbox.. I'm sure his voice his heard like thunder at Blizzard.. and anywhere inside this industry. In every company where I worked, most techies read slashdot.. Because like it or not, hundreds of thousands of readers will read this, including many many of their customers.
This fight over the control of the DNS system really is part of a greater problem that the US has.. This week, UNESCO adopted a convention on cultural diversity, which basicly excludes "cultural industries" and "cultural products" from free trade agreements. Of the 150 countries that voted on it, 148 voted in favor, 2 voted against (the USA and Israel). Its interesting to note that this convention was not spearheaded by Iran or China.. but by France, Canada and the UK, the USA's closest allies.
Be careful, the world can live without US control!