In other news... Honda's president announced that there is no longer a need for ocean freighters, He said "Honda's CVC is smaller, gets better gas mileage and faster than almost any ocean going container ship." He also pointed out that they are much more popular. "There are millions of Honda civic out there but only a few thousand ocean going freight ships. Our product is much more popular" Therefore he suggested that shipping companies, and oil companies begin immediately using Honda civic to ship their products around the world. When asked how he intends to handle the fact that Honda's don't float. He said, "Yes this does make it slightly more challenging to carry products across the Atlantic, but how many people really do that anyway? Besides, we are working on that feature. It should be in the 1.9 rev of the CVC kernel"
Nothing new here. FidoNet has been providing latency tolerant networking since the 1980s. Just ask our friends in Cuba, they're still using something similar, but thumb drives and USB key fobs means the packet size can be well over a Gigabyte. Put that in your pipe I mean 'series of tubes', and smoke it!
We all learned it during the 1970's "energy crisis", the problem isn't lack of energy. The problem is that the energy is in the wrong form in the wrong place at the wrong time. IT does have a solution for that, Global demand load balancing. Outsource your IT demand to a server in Iceland or somewhere else where energy is cheap and clean. Putting your PCs and servers in big cities where both energy and real estate is expensive is already as out of fashion as 10$ oil, Microsoft Windows and Reaganomics.
What is interesting is watching how the IT support ratio changes with technology. I helped a bank move from Windows fat clients to Linux fat clients using central LDAP controlled configuration, remote installs and upgrades and watched their IT support ratio decrease by a factor of 20. Moving to thin client on big iron running Solaris/*nix and you could easily increase this by another factor of 10. I doubt my own company even has 1 IT support person per 1000 Sun Ray desktops.
The internet archive has a very old version with the first few MP3s he downloaded. Now be nice and don't kill this one O.K.? And whoever was blasting him with wget loops, can you please host your mirror and post a link here?
Victor Borge's inflation language is coming back inthree vogue and it's just as twoterful as it was befive! Now back three watching Olympic elevenis.
Back when kids chemistry sets contained a few chemicals not found in mom's kitchen and no one was making crank with stuff which was in mom's kitchen, my skillkraft set had something I swear was called "methylethylene blue", but maybe the guy who typed the label stuttered at the keyboard.
I also vaguely remember that one practical use for medical grade methylene blue was as an antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning, since it's one of the few not-so-toxic substances which binds to hemoglobin more strongly than CO molecules.
Third, I suspect the GPL is the Open Source license *most* court-tested.
You may be correct here, but don't be surprised if it does eventually break apart, businesses (especially U.S. based businesses) are accustomed to dealing with extremely complex laws and if GPL gets in the way of the likes of Microsoft/GM/ADM... look out! Many companies have higher revenue than the GNPs of all but the G8 and they don't even like abiding by U.S. tax law, much less Kyoto, WTC etc. GPL is hardly a bit of road-kill, much less an obstacle to the wishes of these mega corprations.
Fourth, Linux's GPL license does not prevent any codec from running on it. It's the authors of the codecs and patent holders that do that.
Then you'd better spend your time trying to lobby Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Fraunhoffer, the MPAA... instead of worrying about what license Sun frees its software under. You can blame the bad people who wrote these CODECs or you can look into the real incompatibilities between GPL and codecs, problems which LGPL, BSD, MPL and CDDL don't have:
This is taken from the fluendo website http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php)
"If you are living in a country where the mp3 patents don't apply you can of course use the source code provided by Fluendo (or anyone else) to get legal mp3 support onto your Unix/GNU/Linux desktop.
On the other hand, if you live in a country where the patents apply, or if you are a distribution maker who sells your distribution in countries where the patents apply, then you need the licensed binary from Fluendo. This of course is no problem, but be aware that even if our binary is made from MIT licensed source code the resulting binary combined with our license is not free software, at least not GPL-compatible. This means that if you ship GStreamer with our binary mp3 plug-in, you need to be sure that you don't ship any GPL-licensed plug-ins that could end up being used together with the mp3 plug-in, as this would violate the GPL. And you don't want to violate the GPL. You also need to make sure you don't ship any GPL-licensed players which would use this plug-in.
And finally, the GPL hurts Linux's stability? Truly it is a powerful license, but I never imagined that it had such capabilities...
It hurts Linux's stability by allowing Stallman and thousands of others to live in a fantasy world where GPL's viral nature overcomes Microsoft/Sony/Apple and other IP holders will bow to a non-paying 1% marketshare and make things convenient for this minority. It allows Linus to "not care about ABI stability" because he too lives this fantasy.
If you wanted a copyleft license, why didn't you just use the GPL or LGPL?
We needed an open source license that allowed files released under the license to be linked with files released under other licenses. While a license like LGPL would allow this for dynamically-linked code, we also needed to be able to release software that statically links source files available under different licenses. In addition, we wanted to allow others to add externsions to OpenSolaris with different license terms. This was only possible under a license like the MPL; however, we could not use the MPL because it is not a "template" license allowing reuse by others. Consequently, we crafted a variant of the MPL, taking the opportunity to make it a template license as a step towards reducing license proliferation for others finding themselves in a similar position.
If Sun were "out to get Linux", it would relicense StarOffice, Java and MySQL in a way which would prevent it from running on GNU/Linux.
There is a really nice document showing the redlined diffs from the MPL license. GPL is a great license in theory but it hasn't been tested in court and does run into problems in the real world where it hurts Linux's long-term hardware compatibility and stability, prevents many multimedia codecs (e.g. DVD+MPEG2+CSS) from ever being legally supported in a GNU/Linux distribution.
Sun already has most of the useful stuff in the upper part of the GNU/Linux stack because most of it is licensed under BSD/MPL/Apache... licenses which are all compatible with CDDL and run well on OpenSolaris (see openSolaris2008.05 and Nexenta for examples.)
The tiny part of "Linux" which can't be easily used on OpenSolaris, the real Linux almost no one thinks about when they're talking about RedHat, Novell...
is Linus's kernel, the filesystem, drivers and a few other bits. What the #^~@% would Sun do with another kernel? The kernel in OpenSolaris has scalability, security and observability features that are only being dreamed about in Linus's kernel. But more importantly, the OpenSolaris kernel has stable APIs and ABIs so you won't have to rebuild and requalify all of your business logic the next time Linus adds a kernel module to support this week's latest X86 (&@?ware.
ZFS is already opensourced and available to all Operating systems with CDDL compatible licences. It is already available in BSD, OSX, OpenSolaris (All distributions including Nexenta,OpenSolaris2008.05,Nevada,Belenix,Schillix,Martux,Milax)
ZFS read is already in OSX 10.5 and I've installed the beta ZFS write in Mac OSX 10.5, created a pool on a USB keychain, imported that pool into OpenSolaris2008.05 (which automagically mounted it). Put stuff on it, snapshotted it, exported it and reimported it into OSX. This is the filesystem of the future. The fact that GPL isn't compatible with ZFS is Linus's problem. Good luck with that FUSE module.
I think anyone who has attempted to legally link proprietary drivers, video codecs with the Linux kernel would understand some of GPL's limitations. The fact that GPL can take from so many licenses (without necessarily exporting) doesn't automagically make it the best license.
CDDL is based on MPL which has an explicit patent protection clause (bring a patent suit against another CDDL licensee and you lose all CDDL rights)
The fact that (besides Java), Sun hasn't released much GPL code should not cause us to ignore significant contributions by Sun to the opensource community. According to a E.U. study on The economic impacts of free and opensource software, Sun contributed 312 million Euro's worth of FOSS which amounts to over 51000 person months. This was 44% of all corporate contributions to FOSS. The next highest contributor was IBM with 13% then Red Hat with 8%. The rest SuSE, Netscape, AT&T... don't even add up to Sun's contribution.
And this study came out before Java was GPL'd.
No, welcome to the work-world of the U.S. (circa 1990-200?). Much of the world hasn't adopted these draconian and dehumanizing disemployment procedures. They rely on human decency during severance just as U.S. companies once did.
The common practice of frog walking terminated employees to the nearest exit results in far more long term damage than the hypothetical "disgruntled employee on his/her way out" ever could. I suspect some of the HR managers came up with this process in order to meld the Japanese "work to death" management theories with the U.S. "T minus 0 seconds of job security." It doesn't work but it gives the HR wonks something to justify their own jobs. Think of it this way, when Joe employee has zero job security, every minute of every day becomes a "I may be on my way out" minute. What makes that employee any less likely to do the damage 30 seconds before the termination decision is made? This is what we have across the U.S. right now and people wonder why you can't get a clerk at the *mart, why you can't get good service anywhere and why corporations are infested with incompetent, selfish, opportunists who steal from customers and sabotage companies and co-workers in order to gain "job security." The team player is dead, it's every man for himself in corporate America.
The odd thing is that these same American multinational companies often do have sane and humane exit policies for their outsourced contractors and their overseas employees.
If you're traveling by air, use a Gobi thin client laptop. When you arrive at your destination, connect to your secure home network via VPN over wifi or 3G and bring up the same session you left safe at home! If anyone raises an eyebrow, tell them you got the idea from the former CTO of the DIA
Excellent points, and I'm all for restoring funding for basic research. However, the scale of the CO2 sequestering problem means it won't be economically feasible compared with almost any carbon-neutral alternative energy source (solar, nuclear, wave, wind...) If you think transportation and long-term storage for a few tons of a glass encased solid spent Nuclear fuel rods is a problem, try to picture this:
About 40 train car loads of coal are burned in a typical 500MW plant each day is a reaction that releases SO2/NO2,Mercury and radioactive material along with CO2(still not considered to be a pollutant by our Department of Environment). For simplicity, let's ignore that other lung rot and focus on, C + O2 ----> CO2 where each CO2 Molucule weights about 3.6 times as much as the carbon it came from.
So for sequestering, we have 144 train cars leaving the coal plant every day. Scale this up to the 3 burner megaplant being built in my home town which already requires over 1100 train cars every day and you'd have to have about 4000 train cars leaving the plant every day.
This all assumes we've overcome the magic alchemy of converting CO2 back to something easily transported without consuming more energy or sequesturing the carbon in a material that is even heavier than CO2 (e.g. carbonate rocks). Realistic estimates of carbon alchemy assume that is is acceptable to use 200% or 300% more coal to produce the energy if that energy is carbon zero.
We already have a choice of reduced carbon energy production and we ignore the elephant in the room represented by the biggest, cheapest and most practical carbon reduction strategy, reduced consumption. Carbon sequestering will be remembered as the biggest taxpayer funded boondoggle since corn ethanol.
ZFS doesnt offer me anything as im not managing servers
Are you using content of any sort (images, documents, mp3s...)? Do you care about the longevity or integrity of any of your data? Have you ever lost data? Slap a GUI on ZFS, call it "time machine" and you don't have to be "managing servers" to appreciate what ZFS can provide to Joe user.
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
If you think dtrace is just for developers, you don't understand dtrace. Developers have always been able to scatter printfs in the code and set breakpoints in debuggers to glean what their piece of code is doing. The beauty of dtrace is that it allows anyone (including users, service technicians and even managers), to see what is happening on a system-wide basis without compiling or even having access to the any of the source code of processes running on that system. dtrace will prove itself far more useful for system administration and post-deployment troubleshooting than it will for developers.
But what about Joe user? Have you ever encountered an application hang? Have you ever encountered a sluggish system where "top" shows and "top" as the top process at only 3% CPU usage? Have you ever wondered whether any of your applications (e.g. spyware) are doing something they shouldn't be doing? Have you ever wondered why doubling CPU clock frequency hasn't made your environment any faster, and whether it is possible that other bottlenecks (I/O, paging activity...) might be responsible for a performance problem? Dtrace is the tool which allows you to see all of this.
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
Oh come on. I supported GNU/Linux long enough to know what a kludge rc.* startup scripts are. I know how non-deterministic it is and how many race conditions exist in a typical startup which work most of the time only by chance. While this is fine for a single user laptop, for enterprise looking for 6 figure reliability on massive clusters, rc.* doesn't cut it. There is a very good reason why GNU/Linux is moving towards what Solaris already has.
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
Well, I suppose you could say the same for other *nix features:
"Rsync doesn't seam(sic) any better than cp..."
"tar doesn't seem any better than cpio..."
The biggest advantage for the enterprise user is that IPS is backwards compatible with the thousands of existing SVR4 packages and patches. RPM and Debian APT never will be. RPM and Debian APT do not know about zones, nor know how to handle package installs and upgrades across zones nor will they be able to ever take advantage of zfs snapshot/rollback features for seamless install/uninstall.
Where have you been? Java source code has been available for a long time but after years of people complaining that it wasn't "free enough", Sun fully released Java under a GPL 2 years ago.
OpenOffice not really GPL
O.K. so it's LGPL So what, so is Gtk, most of GNOME and probably 80% of what you and joe-sixpack considers to be "opensource" in "Linux". GPL is just one license. GPL was never fully tested in court and doesn't provide patent indemnity as CDDL does. I'd be happier if Java, OpenOffice and MySQL were CDDL but there would be too much gnashing of teeth from the Linux creationists.
OpenSolaris i dont know enough about
OpenSolaris is licensed under CDDL. Look here for an FAQ which explains in simple terms why CDDL is superior to GPL.
I know the Clinton's skeletons and it really doesn't bother me because life was pretty much good during Clinton's time after the recession under the first Bush. I could put up with it again.
Many people make this mistake. Hillary Clinton is a woman[Tm], not a time machine. Slashdotters should know the difference. Time machines have more knobs and gages.
Even if she were a time machine, it would be very difficult to reproduce the conditions which allowed a decade of prosperity despite the actions (or lack of) of two corrupt and stupid presidents. Imagine going back to 1992 and making sure you don't step on a fly, lest you change these conditions:
The reasonably peaceful breakup of the Soviet empire. (Clinton and Bush just watched, they didn't even take advantage of the once in a lifetime opportunity!)
The invention of computer and internet technology which allowed JIT warehousing, enabled globalization and led to vast improvements in efficiency. (Neither Clinton, nor Bush nor Gore can take credit for this)
Opening up of China, Latin America and other markets and their cheap labor while deficit spending and cheap credit allowed us to isolate our labor force from potential deflationary impacts on wages. (O.K Clinton did sign NAFTA and seemed to have a good relationship with Chinese campaign donors so maybe he did have something to do with this, but Nixon, Carter and Reagan probably had more of an impact on China.
Global wage arbitrage and productivity increases resulting from computers and internet also allowed the Fed to keep interest rates low, spurring growth here but offshoring the inflation.
Oil prices were less than $20/bbl (Clinton signed the "SUV loophole" laws which created the demand for such beasts and helped drive oil back up to $102/bbl where it apparently belongs.)
The bulk of our population (Baby boomers) were in their peak earning years so Clinton/Bush et al could sweep the Social Security insolvency under the rug for another 12-18 years... and whistle in the dark, hoping no one would notice. (Gingrich was the perfect diversion from Clinton's numerous non sex related shenanigans, so he took the fall but I assure you that had mother Theresa suggested a Social Security fix as early as the mid 90s, she would have also been put on a skewer.)
It could work, but don't step on any flys and keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times, it is moving at the same speed as reality.
I'll be convinced that the Catholic church is reformed when they fill St. Peter's square with statues or memorials lamenting the killings, excommunications and other abuse of:
Copernicus
Bruno
Galileo
Joan of Arc
Martin Luther
All those killed during the Inquisition and the Crusades
The children abused by priests and Christian brothers over the years
And many others.
The Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) group at UI-Urbana-Champaign has some applets demonstrating how the Grid works. It seems to be impossible to distribute power from any source (hydro, wind, nuclear, coal...) to any load without a connection to the external grid.
If the internet were like the grid, you wouldn't be able to use your PC unless it were connected to the internet. I personally think the future grid will have a few of these large aging doorstops like the Turkey point reactors and the enormous new coal plants being constructed in SE Wisconsin and elsewhere. But many people will choose to have their own Solar shingles, MicroWind turbines or (more likely) Heat/Electric co-generation fuel cells in their basement. You probably won't see nuclear in the house for the next 100 years, but co-generation almost makes sense now, especially in cold climates where fuel cell waste heat can be used for hot water and home heat, moving efficiency well above 90%.
As is pointed out by this outage, big ugly centralized generation is profitable to the monopolists who control the generators, but not nearly as reliable as microgeneration could be.
The massive ERGS coal plant being built in Oak Creek, WI will depend on the delivery of over 1000 rail cars of coal each day, which all comes via a single rail line. How much more likely is a failure of this (and 2400 Megawatts) than the simultaneous failure of hundreds fuel cell cogenerators on a day when there is also no sun and no wind?
I made a video when we visited the Library of Congress in the year 2000. I filmed parts of their amazing collection of early books, copies of the Gutenberg bible, etc. Then I went to the information kiosks and filmed a circle of computers all displaying the classic Microsoft blue-screen.
O.K. I know "PC" is now well integrated into the popular vocabulary as an X86 machine which runs Microsoft Windows and for most outside the Slashdot readership, "programmers" now means those who understand Visual Basic and Excel and "FOSS" means something with a linux kernel under the hood.
But once there was a time when home computers had no DRM, corporations or hobbiests would document the hardware interfaces and share their knowledge and source code via tapes, printouts and magazines such as Compute! I was surprised that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Butterfield and other Commodore/Amiga/Atari... hackers were not on this list.
I'll never forget the article Jim wrote for one of those classic computer magazines where he showed how to copy the Commodore 64 BASIC interpretor into volatile RAM, fix a bug with a 1 byte poke and tell the CPU to use that RAM based interpretor.
The bug was that a program-stopping error occured any time you tried to access the ASCII value of a null string:
e.g. print asc("")
I found that this one byte bug existed on nearly all versions of BASIC available on small computers at the time. Atari, Apple, Amiga, Vic 20, IBM-PC junior. What do these machines have in common? They all purchased parts of their BASIC interpretor from a company called Microsoft.
Jim Butterfield is no longer with us but the optimism and excitement he brought to the world of computers is far more real and lasting than the slash and burn corporate domination brought upon us by the likes of Bill Gates.
what we're seeing is a fairly realistic test of a ballistic missile defence system.
The official MediaSpeak[Tm] term is "Star Wars"(patent pending), and you must follow the term either by the words, "...which of course can't possibly work." or "which was promoted by Ronald Reagan while under the influence of Alzeheimer's disease."
China blows up a satellite with a missile to prove it can be done.
The U.S. says, "knock it off or I'll blot out the moon", launches missile
Total lunar eclipse commences. Cannibals are impressed.
Oh wait, Columbas tried that already as did that fictional Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. Do you think the Cannibals of the world have caught on yet? Nah, surely the rest of the world also has the the attention span and long term memory of a knat.
BTW, does anyone know what Britany Spears will be up to during the eclipse?
I interviewed for a job once at SLAC, but barely remember enough of it to know if the beginnings of my my short story featuring SLAC are vaguely accurate. It seems that they were using Amiga computers when I was there and searching for the W particle.
I don't know, I suppose it is the 0 dimensional particle thought to exist at the core of Bush's brain?
Slashdot Mirror
But does it run DOS?
In other news... Honda's president announced that there is no longer a need for ocean freighters, He said "Honda's CVC is smaller, gets better gas mileage and faster than almost any ocean going container ship." He also pointed out that they are much more popular. "There are millions of Honda civic out there but only a few thousand ocean going freight ships. Our product is much more popular" Therefore he suggested that shipping companies, and oil companies begin immediately using Honda civic to ship their products around the world. When asked how he intends to handle the fact that Honda's don't float. He said, "Yes this does make it slightly more challenging to carry products across the Atlantic, but how many people really do that anyway? Besides, we are working on that feature. It should be in the 1.9 rev of the CVC kernel"
Nothing new here. FidoNet has been providing latency tolerant networking since the 1980s. Just ask our friends in Cuba, they're still using something similar, but thumb drives and USB key fobs means the packet size can be well over a Gigabyte. Put that in your pipe I mean 'series of tubes', and smoke it!
We all learned it during the 1970's "energy crisis", the problem isn't lack of energy. The problem is that the energy is in the wrong form in the wrong place at the wrong time. IT does have a solution for that, Global demand load balancing. Outsource your IT demand to a server in Iceland or somewhere else where energy is cheap and clean. Putting your PCs and servers in big cities where both energy and real estate is expensive is already as out of fashion as 10$ oil, Microsoft Windows and Reaganomics.
What is interesting is watching how the IT support ratio changes with technology. I helped a bank move from Windows fat clients to Linux fat clients using central LDAP controlled configuration, remote installs and upgrades and watched their IT support ratio decrease by a factor of 20. Moving to thin client on big iron running Solaris/*nix and you could easily increase this by another factor of 10. I doubt my own company even has 1 IT support person per 1000 Sun Ray desktops.
The internet archive has a very old version with the first few MP3s he downloaded. Now be nice and don't kill this one O.K.? And whoever was blasting him with wget loops, can you please host your mirror and post a link here?
Victor Borge's inflation language is coming back inthree vogue and it's just as twoterful as it was befive! Now back three watching Olympic elevenis.
Back when kids chemistry sets contained a few chemicals not found in mom's kitchen and no one was making crank with stuff which was in mom's kitchen, my skillkraft set had something I swear was called "methylethylene blue", but maybe the guy who typed the label stuttered at the keyboard.
I also vaguely remember that one practical use for medical grade methylene blue was as an antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning, since it's one of the few not-so-toxic substances which binds to hemoglobin more strongly than CO molecules.
That question is answered in the link, at least as far as the most common OSI approved licences, GPL, LGPL, MPL...
Second, a license that prevented programs from running on GNU/Linux would (by definition) not be an Open Source license.Neither GNU nor Linux is mentioned in OSI's definition of Open Source.
Third, I suspect the GPL is the Open Source license *most* court-tested.You may be correct here, but don't be surprised if it does eventually break apart, businesses (especially U.S. based businesses) are accustomed to dealing with extremely complex laws and if GPL gets in the way of the likes of Microsoft/GM/ADM... look out! Many companies have higher revenue than the GNPs of all but the G8 and they don't even like abiding by U.S. tax law, much less Kyoto, WTC etc. GPL is hardly a bit of road-kill, much less an obstacle to the wishes of these mega corprations.
Fourth, Linux's GPL license does not prevent any codec from running on it. It's the authors of the codecs and patent holders that do that.Then you'd better spend your time trying to lobby Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Fraunhoffer, the MPAA... instead of worrying about what license Sun frees its software under. You can blame the bad people who wrote these CODECs or you can look into the real incompatibilities between GPL and codecs, problems which LGPL, BSD, MPL and CDDL don't have:
This is taken from the fluendo website http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php) "If you are living in a country where the mp3 patents don't apply you can of course use the source code provided by Fluendo (or anyone else) to get legal mp3 support onto your Unix/GNU/Linux desktop. On the other hand, if you live in a country where the patents apply, or if you are a distribution maker who sells your distribution in countries where the patents apply, then you need the licensed binary from Fluendo. This of course is no problem, but be aware that even if our binary is made from MIT licensed source code the resulting binary combined with our license is not free software, at least not GPL-compatible. This means that if you ship GStreamer with our binary mp3 plug-in, you need to be sure that you don't ship any GPL-licensed plug-ins that could end up being used together with the mp3 plug-in, as this would violate the GPL. And you don't want to violate the GPL. You also need to make sure you don't ship any GPL-licensed players which would use this plug-in.And finally, the GPL hurts Linux's stability? Truly it is a powerful license, but I never imagined that it had such capabilities...
It hurts Linux's stability by allowing Stallman and thousands of others to live in a fantasy world where GPL's viral nature overcomes Microsoft/Sony/Apple and other IP holders will bow to a non-paying 1% marketshare and make things convenient for this minority. It allows Linus to "not care about ABI stability" because he too lives this fantasy.
From the CDDL FAQ at OpenSolaris.org:
If you wanted a copyleft license, why didn't you just use the GPL or LGPL? We needed an open source license that allowed files released under the license to be linked with files released under other licenses. While a license like LGPL would allow this for dynamically-linked code, we also needed to be able to release software that statically links source files available under different licenses. In addition, we wanted to allow others to add externsions to OpenSolaris with different license terms. This was only possible under a license like the MPL; however, we could not use the MPL because it is not a "template" license allowing reuse by others. Consequently, we crafted a variant of the MPL, taking the opportunity to make it a template license as a step towards reducing license proliferation for others finding themselves in a similar position.
If Sun were "out to get Linux", it would relicense StarOffice, Java and MySQL in a way which would prevent it from running on GNU/Linux.
There is a really nice document showing the redlined diffs from the MPL license. GPL is a great license in theory but it hasn't been tested in court and does run into problems in the real world where it hurts Linux's long-term hardware compatibility and stability, prevents many multimedia codecs (e.g. DVD+MPEG2+CSS) from ever being legally supported in a GNU/Linux distribution.
Sun already has most of the useful stuff in the upper part of the GNU/Linux stack because most of it is licensed under BSD/MPL/Apache... licenses which are all compatible with CDDL and run well on OpenSolaris (see openSolaris2008.05 and Nexenta for examples.)
The tiny part of "Linux" which can't be easily used on OpenSolaris, the real Linux almost no one thinks about when they're talking about RedHat, Novell... is Linus's kernel, the filesystem, drivers and a few other bits. What the #^~@% would Sun do with another kernel? The kernel in OpenSolaris has scalability, security and observability features that are only being dreamed about in Linus's kernel. But more importantly, the OpenSolaris kernel has stable APIs and ABIs so you won't have to rebuild and requalify all of your business logic the next time Linus adds a kernel module to support this week's latest X86 (&@?ware.
ZFS is already opensourced and available to all Operating systems with CDDL compatible licences. It is already available in BSD, OSX, OpenSolaris (All distributions including Nexenta,OpenSolaris2008.05,Nevada,Belenix,Schillix,Martux,Milax)
ZFS read is already in OSX 10.5 and I've installed the beta ZFS write in Mac OSX 10.5, created a pool on a USB keychain, imported that pool into OpenSolaris2008.05 (which automagically mounted it). Put stuff on it, snapshotted it, exported it and reimported it into OSX. This is the filesystem of the future. The fact that GPL isn't compatible with ZFS is Linus's problem. Good luck with that FUSE module.
I think anyone who has attempted to legally link proprietary drivers, video codecs with the Linux kernel would understand some of GPL's limitations. The fact that GPL can take from so many licenses (without necessarily exporting) doesn't automagically make it the best license.
CDDL is based on MPL which has an explicit patent protection clause (bring a patent suit against another CDDL licensee and you lose all CDDL rights)
The fact that (besides Java), Sun hasn't released much GPL code should not cause us to ignore significant contributions by Sun to the opensource community. According to a E.U. study on The economic impacts of free and opensource software, Sun contributed 312 million Euro's worth of FOSS which amounts to over 51000 person months. This was 44% of all corporate contributions to FOSS. The next highest contributor was IBM with 13% then Red Hat with 8%. The rest SuSE, Netscape, AT&T... don't even add up to Sun's contribution. And this study came out before Java was GPL'd.
No, welcome to the work-world of the U.S. (circa 1990-200?). Much of the world hasn't adopted these draconian and dehumanizing disemployment procedures. They rely on human decency during severance just as U.S. companies once did.
The common practice of frog walking terminated employees to the nearest exit results in far more long term damage than the hypothetical "disgruntled employee on his/her way out" ever could. I suspect some of the HR managers came up with this process in order to meld the Japanese "work to death" management theories with the U.S. "T minus 0 seconds of job security." It doesn't work but it gives the HR wonks something to justify their own jobs. Think of it this way, when Joe employee has zero job security, every minute of every day becomes a "I may be on my way out" minute. What makes that employee any less likely to do the damage 30 seconds before the termination decision is made? This is what we have across the U.S. right now and people wonder why you can't get a clerk at the *mart, why you can't get good service anywhere and why corporations are infested with incompetent, selfish, opportunists who steal from customers and sabotage companies and co-workers in order to gain "job security." The team player is dead, it's every man for himself in corporate America.
The odd thing is that these same American multinational companies often do have sane and humane exit policies for their outsourced contractors and their overseas employees.
If you're traveling by air, use a Gobi thin client laptop. When you arrive at your destination, connect to your secure home network via VPN over wifi or 3G and bring up the same session you left safe at home! If anyone raises an eyebrow, tell them you got the idea from the former CTO of the DIA
Excellent points, and I'm all for restoring funding for basic research. However, the scale of the CO2 sequestering problem means it won't be economically feasible compared with almost any carbon-neutral alternative energy source (solar, nuclear, wave, wind...) If you think transportation and long-term storage for a few tons of a glass encased solid spent Nuclear fuel rods is a problem, try to picture this:
About 40 train car loads of coal are burned in a typical 500MW plant each day is a reaction that releases SO2/NO2,Mercury and radioactive material along with CO2(still not considered to be a pollutant by our Department of Environment). For simplicity, let's ignore that other lung rot and focus on, C + O2 ----> CO2 where each CO2 Molucule weights about 3.6 times as much as the carbon it came from.
So for sequestering, we have 144 train cars leaving the coal plant every day. Scale this up to the 3 burner megaplant being built in my home town which already requires over 1100 train cars every day and you'd have to have about 4000 train cars leaving the plant every day.
This all assumes we've overcome the magic alchemy of converting CO2 back to something easily transported without consuming more energy or sequesturing the carbon in a material that is even heavier than CO2 (e.g. carbonate rocks). Realistic estimates of carbon alchemy assume that is is acceptable to use 200% or 300% more coal to produce the energy if that energy is carbon zero.
We already have a choice of reduced carbon energy production and we ignore the elephant in the room represented by the biggest, cheapest and most practical carbon reduction strategy, reduced consumption. Carbon sequestering will be remembered as the biggest taxpayer funded boondoggle since corn ethanol.
Reference: http://www.carbonzerocoal.com/decarbonization.html
ZFS doesnt offer me anything as im not managing servers
Are you using content of any sort (images, documents, mp3s...)? Do you care about the longevity or integrity of any of your data? Have you ever lost data? Slap a GUI on ZFS, call it "time machine" and you don't have to be "managing servers" to appreciate what ZFS can provide to Joe user.
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
If you think dtrace is just for developers, you don't understand dtrace. Developers have always been able to scatter printfs in the code and set breakpoints in debuggers to glean what their piece of code is doing. The beauty of dtrace is that it allows anyone (including users, service technicians and even managers), to see what is happening on a system-wide basis without compiling or even having access to the any of the source code of processes running on that system. dtrace will prove itself far more useful for system administration and post-deployment troubleshooting than it will for developers.
But what about Joe user? Have you ever encountered an application hang? Have you ever encountered a sluggish system where "top" shows and "top" as the top process at only 3% CPU usage? Have you ever wondered whether any of your applications (e.g. spyware) are doing something they shouldn't be doing? Have you ever wondered why doubling CPU clock frequency hasn't made your environment any faster, and whether it is possible that other bottlenecks (I/O, paging activity...) might be responsible for a performance problem? Dtrace is the tool which allows you to see all of this.
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
Oh come on. I supported GNU/Linux long enough to know what a kludge rc.* startup scripts are. I know how non-deterministic it is and how many race conditions exist in a typical startup which work most of the time only by chance. While this is fine for a single user laptop, for enterprise looking for 6 figure reliability on massive clusters, rc.* doesn't cut it. There is a very good reason why GNU/Linux is moving towards what Solaris already has.
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
Well, I suppose you could say the same for other *nix features: "Rsync doesn't seam(sic) any better than cp..." "tar doesn't seem any better than cpio..."
The biggest advantage for the enterprise user is that IPS is backwards compatible with the thousands of existing SVR4 packages and patches. RPM and Debian APT never will be. RPM and Debian APT do not know about zones, nor know how to handle package installs and upgrades across zones nor will they be able to ever take advantage of zfs snapshot/rollback features for seamless install/uninstall.
Where have you been? Java source code has been available for a long time but after years of people complaining that it wasn't "free enough", Sun fully released Java under a GPL 2 years ago.
OpenOffice not really GPLO.K. so it's LGPL So what, so is Gtk, most of GNOME and probably 80% of what you and joe-sixpack considers to be "opensource" in "Linux". GPL is just one license. GPL was never fully tested in court and doesn't provide patent indemnity as CDDL does. I'd be happier if Java, OpenOffice and MySQL were CDDL but there would be too much gnashing of teeth from the Linux creationists.
OpenSolaris i dont know enough aboutOpenSolaris is licensed under CDDL. Look here for an FAQ which explains in simple terms why CDDL is superior to GPL.
Many people make this mistake. Hillary Clinton is a woman[Tm], not a time machine. Slashdotters should know the difference. Time machines have more knobs and gages.
Even if she were a time machine, it would be very difficult to reproduce the conditions which allowed a decade of prosperity despite the actions (or lack of) of two corrupt and stupid presidents. Imagine going back to 1992 and making sure you don't step on a fly, lest you change these conditions:
- The reasonably peaceful breakup of the Soviet empire. (Clinton and Bush just watched, they didn't even take advantage of the once in a lifetime opportunity!)
- The invention of computer and internet technology which allowed JIT warehousing, enabled globalization and led to vast improvements in efficiency. (Neither Clinton, nor Bush nor Gore can take credit for this)
- Opening up of China, Latin America and other markets and their cheap labor while deficit spending and cheap credit allowed us to isolate our labor force from potential deflationary impacts on wages. (O.K Clinton did sign NAFTA and seemed to have a good relationship with Chinese campaign donors so maybe he did have something to do with this, but Nixon, Carter and Reagan probably had more of an impact on China.
- Global wage arbitrage and productivity increases resulting from computers and internet also allowed the Fed to keep interest rates low, spurring growth here but offshoring the inflation.
- Oil prices were less than $20/bbl (Clinton signed the "SUV loophole" laws which created the demand for such beasts and helped drive oil back up to $102/bbl where it apparently belongs.)
- The bulk of our population (Baby boomers) were in their peak earning years so Clinton/Bush et al could sweep the Social Security insolvency under the rug for another 12-18 years... and whistle in the dark, hoping no one would notice. (Gingrich was the perfect diversion from Clinton's numerous non sex related shenanigans, so he took the fall but I assure you that had mother Theresa suggested a Social Security fix as early as the mid 90s, she would have also been put on a skewer.)
It could work, but don't step on any flys and keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times, it is moving at the same speed as reality.I'll be convinced that the Catholic church is reformed when they fill St. Peter's square with statues or memorials lamenting the killings, excommunications and other abuse of: Copernicus Bruno Galileo Joan of Arc Martin Luther All those killed during the Inquisition and the Crusades The children abused by priests and Christian brothers over the years And many others.
The Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) group at UI-Urbana-Champaign has some applets demonstrating how the Grid works. It seems to be impossible to distribute power from any source (hydro, wind, nuclear, coal...) to any load without a connection to the external grid.
If the internet were like the grid, you wouldn't be able to use your PC unless it were connected to the internet. I personally think the future grid will have a few of these large aging doorstops like the Turkey point reactors and the enormous new coal plants being constructed in SE Wisconsin and elsewhere. But many people will choose to have their own Solar shingles, MicroWind turbines or (more likely) Heat/Electric co-generation fuel cells in their basement. You probably won't see nuclear in the house for the next 100 years, but co-generation almost makes sense now, especially in cold climates where fuel cell waste heat can be used for hot water and home heat, moving efficiency well above 90%.
As is pointed out by this outage, big ugly centralized generation is profitable to the monopolists who control the generators, but not nearly as reliable as microgeneration could be. The massive ERGS coal plant being built in Oak Creek, WI will depend on the delivery of over 1000 rail cars of coal each day, which all comes via a single rail line. How much more likely is a failure of this (and 2400 Megawatts) than the simultaneous failure of hundreds fuel cell cogenerators on a day when there is also no sun and no wind?I made a video when we visited the Library of Congress in the year 2000. I filmed parts of their amazing collection of early books, copies of the Gutenberg bible, etc. Then I went to the information kiosks and filmed a circle of computers all displaying the classic Microsoft blue-screen.
O.K. I know "PC" is now well integrated into the popular vocabulary as an X86 machine which runs Microsoft Windows and for most outside the Slashdot readership, "programmers" now means those who understand Visual Basic and Excel and "FOSS" means something with a linux kernel under the hood.
But once there was a time when home computers had no DRM, corporations or hobbiests would document the hardware interfaces and share their knowledge and source code via tapes, printouts and magazines such as Compute! I was surprised that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Butterfield and other Commodore/Amiga/Atari... hackers were not on this list.
I'll never forget the article Jim wrote for one of those classic computer magazines where he showed how to copy the Commodore 64 BASIC interpretor into volatile RAM, fix a bug with a 1 byte poke and tell the CPU to use that RAM based interpretor.
The bug was that a program-stopping error occured any time you tried to access the ASCII value of a null string:
Jim Butterfield is no longer with us but the optimism and excitement he brought to the world of computers is far more real and lasting than the slash and burn corporate domination brought upon us by the likes of Bill Gates.e.g. print asc("")
I found that this one byte bug existed on nearly all versions of BASIC available on small computers at the time. Atari, Apple, Amiga, Vic 20, IBM-PC junior. What do these machines have in common? They all purchased parts of their BASIC interpretor from a company called Microsoft.
The official MediaSpeak[Tm] term is "Star Wars"(patent pending), and you must follow the term either by the words, "...which of course can't possibly work." or "which was promoted by Ronald Reagan while under the influence of Alzeheimer's disease."
- China blows up a satellite with a missile to prove it can be done.
- The U.S. says, "knock it off or I'll blot out the moon", launches missile
- Total lunar eclipse commences. Cannibals are impressed.
Oh wait, Columbas tried that already as did that fictional Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. Do you think the Cannibals of the world have caught on yet? Nah, surely the rest of the world also has the the attention span and long term memory of a knat.BTW, does anyone know what Britany Spears will be up to during the eclipse?
I interviewed for a job once at SLAC, but barely remember enough of it to know if the beginnings of my my short story featuring SLAC are vaguely accurate. It seems that they were using Amiga computers when I was there and searching for the W particle.
I don't know, I suppose it is the 0 dimensional particle thought to exist at the core of Bush's brain?