Maybe, but 'free software' is kinda grandfathered in, I feel. RMS was using the phrase back in 1985 and it became established as the normal English phrase for what it means. Besides, all different ideologies refer to being 'free' and to freedom, so I don't think the word is that objectionable.
'Open Source' however was coined much later and for purely marketing reasons. There was no need for the term and it was just invented by ESR and pals to sound more appealing to PHBs.
If history had been the other way round - Open Source being the established term, and 'free software' being suddenly invented by RMS for weird political reasons - then I would agree with you.
The trouble is not the Open Source Definition but the very lax way in which the self-appointed guardians of Open Source interpret it. For example they passed Apple's APSL despite it allowing Apple to revoke your rights to the software at any time.
RMS and the FSF take a much more worst-case approach to evaluating licences: 'assuming the nastiest possible lawyers, would I still have the right to use, share and change the software?'. Irrespective of RMS's political views, I find this approach to classifying licences much more reassuring than the press-release-driven OSI.
Windows CE is 'closed source'. You can get the source, but it's not open.
Linux is 'open source'. You can get the source code and redistribute it freely, with changes.
Windows XP is 'no source at all, open, closed or otherwise'.
At least that is how I think about it. But it's best to avoid the politically motivated term 'open source' altogether and just say free software. Then it is clear what you mean, subject to some initial confusion about 'free as in price' from those unfamiliar with the idea.
If Red Hat are removing the Republic of China's flag from their distribution to appease the PRC, does this mean that United Linux will ship with the Taiwanese flag but no communist flag?
Why is Slashdot wasting time with pre-hype about some vaguely defined 'product' that may or may not be released soon when there are so many much more interesting free software projects which are releasing code _now_?
What is this, marketspeak press release of the month competition?
Licensing Crossover I can understand, its functionality isn't easily duplicated (even by the main release of Wine). But this Acronis thingy? Aren't there already n+1 different graphical partitioning tools for Linux?
The only new thing as far as I can tell is support for resizing NTFS partitions. But now that Linux supports NTFS surely even that could be done. I'm surprised SuSE didn't write their own application... perhaps they were just in a hurry to get something out.
Does this mean that AMD's scale for measuring the performace of its CPUs (the Athlon 2200+ runs at 2200 zlotniks) will no longer compare fairly against MHz for the P4? Perhaps a P4 will run about as fast as an Athlon of the same clock speed (if you could get Athlons clocked at 3GHz).
I couldn't be bothered to read all of your post. Can you summarize it please?
(PS I am not American but it is true I just read like 1.63 sentences before skimming along to the next page of comments. The web probably affects attention span more than TV.)
That's what I meant, will the blade form factor become cheaper and more common.
If history is any guide, it's more likely that someone will come up with ATX-blade (a rack where you can fit several ATX motherboards) and that this will take over the server market from the low end upwards.
So are these things going to be available in other countries? Assuming the software is available (and it's Linux, so why not) then this thing could stomp on the Ipaq and other more expensive handhelds. At least for price-conscious buyers such as schools (the old Psion Series 3 and 3a had some success in British schools marketed as the Acorn Pocket Book - and it's a lot cheaper to buy ten of these handhelds for a classroom than a couple of PCs).
I wonder whether we will see a small blade housing being sold for desktop use. A box that sits under your desk and holds between one and four blades (possibly made to look like a single machine with MOSIX). In other words could the 'blade' form factor become a rival for ATX?
The restriction on YaST is that you cannot sell 'data carriers' containing the software. So for example you cannot sell CDs with a Linux distribution that contains YaST (SuSE Linux or otherwise). This seems a bit unreasonable from a company that makes its money selling CDs of software mostly written by others.
Still SuSE's policy is that patches to other programs are released under the same licence as the programs themselves, so they do good work in the rest of their distribution. But since YaST is a proprietary SuSE program, I can't really see the point in learning it (since it ties you to SuSE Linux and can never be used by the other distributions under the current licence). Better to support a distribution like Linux-Mandrake which makes sure its admin tools are released as free software.
YMMV, but at least you can appreciate the reasons why some users prefer to stay away from SuSE.
But considering the price premium that Intel charges for an extra 0.2GHz at the top of its range of processors, it might just be economical to get the expensive cooling system and a slightly slower-rated chip.
This is another way of saying that the prices charged for the very fastest CPUs are silly. But given that some people seem prepared to pay that much, a group of equally silly people would benefit from extreme cooling.
Heatsinks on the _inside_? How would that help? OK it might help a bit but surely you want to attach them to the outside of any hot component. Unfortunately I don't think PSUs are designed to dissipate heat through their casing so heatsinks on that wouldn't help much. I am rather reluctant to open up a PSU even when it's disconnected from the mains - it's the only part of a PC that can kill you.
AFAIK you do not run your monitor 'from' a power supply: the place to plug in a monitor cable is a simple pass-through and doesn't go via the PSU itself.
My power supply does get rather hot so I don't think I'll remove the fan from it. I did have a box with a broken AT power supply where the fan didn't work - it seemed okay. Maybe I should combine that with the fanless Pentium chip (or in fact, I think the fan on that broke too) and I'll be all set.
My goal is to make the computer as quiet as possible and the keyboard as loud as possible. After all the keyboard noise actually _means_ something and it's a real noise, not just a background drone.
I was doing quite well with this goal after I removed the fan from my processor heatsink (it was a P200, and seemed to not get too hot). Unfortunately I then upgraded to an Athlon (Palomino; probably the hottest chip currently sold, though not the fastest) and a fan has become necessary. A fanless power supply would be nice but I don't think they exist at the power levels today's PCs draw.
You're right, the way you order the disk seeks (elevator algorithm or whatever) can make a huge difference to the disk's performance. But I thought that average seek time was a purely physical measurement of how long it takes to do a single seek, from one part of the disk to another. Are you saying that average seek time is in fact computed by sending lots and lots of commands to the drive, letting it reorder them how it wishes, and seeing how long it takes until the last one is completed?
I'm pretty sure it's done by taking two spots on the disk, moving the head to one, and timing how long it takes to get to the next. This is certainly how ye olde disk benchmarks (Norton etc) used to compute the 'average' and 'maximum' seek time figures. The disk and controller did not have any scope to reorder the head movements because each test was done individually, after waiting for the previous one to finish.
Again, I didn't say seek performance, I said seek time. The performance you get in practice will depend both on the physical seek time and on how intelligent the software and firmware is in ordering reads/writes, as you mentioned.
I came to this article from a headline syndicated to Freshmeat. 'Berman retreats, only to regroup.'
Great, I thought!
As long as Piller goes with him, we might have the chance of a Trek sequel sometime in the next ten years that isn't clogged with mushy sentimentality and hackneyed plots. (This after watching the Berman/Piller scripted Insurrection on TV the other night.) Although that threat of regrouping is worrying... what dastardly new series does he plan? Will we see the same process with, say, Seinfeld: The Next Generation? So I clicked on the story to find out the bad news.
Imagine my relief when it just turned out to be some politician with his snout in the trough. Imagine my relief when it
The seek time of a hard disk is a physical property of the head, how fast it can move to a particular track. You could buy one of those slow parallel port disk attachments and the seek time would be just the same as with IDE or SCSI or Fibre Channel or whatever. It doesn't mean that the system's performance will be the same whatever the interface, but I didn't say that. I was talking about the seek time.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but 'free software' is kinda grandfathered in, I feel. RMS was using the phrase back in 1985 and it became established as the normal English phrase for what it means. Besides, all different ideologies refer to being 'free' and to freedom, so I don't think the word is that objectionable.
'Open Source' however was coined much later and for purely marketing reasons. There was no need for the term and it was just invented by ESR and pals to sound more appealing to PHBs.
If history had been the other way round - Open Source being the established term, and 'free software' being suddenly invented by RMS for weird political reasons - then I would agree with you.
Have you considered making that story into a press release? It sounds suitably Onionesque.
The trouble is not the Open Source Definition but the very lax way in which the self-appointed guardians of Open Source interpret it. For example they passed Apple's APSL despite it allowing Apple to revoke your rights to the software at any time.
RMS and the FSF take a much more worst-case approach to evaluating licences: 'assuming the nastiest possible lawyers, would I still have the right to use, share and change the software?'. Irrespective of RMS's political views, I find this approach to classifying licences much more reassuring than the press-release-driven OSI.
Windows CE is 'closed source'. You can get the source, but it's not open.
Linux is 'open source'. You can get the source code and redistribute it freely, with changes.
Windows XP is 'no source at all, open, closed or otherwise'.
At least that is how I think about it. But it's best to avoid the politically motivated term 'open source' altogether and just say free software. Then it is clear what you mean, subject to some initial confusion about 'free as in price' from those unfamiliar with the idea.
If Red Hat are removing the Republic of China's flag from their distribution to appease the PRC, does this mean that United Linux will ship with the Taiwanese flag but no communist flag?
At last, my dream distribution!
Why is Slashdot wasting time with pre-hype about some vaguely defined 'product' that may or may not be released soon when there are so many much more interesting free software projects which are releasing code _now_?
What is this, marketspeak press release of the month competition?
Licensing Crossover I can understand, its functionality isn't easily duplicated (even by the main release of Wine). But this Acronis thingy? Aren't there already n+1 different graphical partitioning tools for Linux?
The only new thing as far as I can tell is support for resizing NTFS partitions. But now that Linux supports NTFS surely even that could be done. I'm surprised SuSE didn't write their own application... perhaps they were just in a hurry to get something out.
'You have requested data that the server has decided not to provide to you. Your request was understood and denied.'
Wow, a self-aware server that _understands_ the Slashdot effect. I wonder if it is part of their mythology.
Does this mean that AMD's scale for measuring the performace of its CPUs (the Athlon 2200+ runs at 2200 zlotniks) will no longer compare fairly against MHz for the P4? Perhaps a P4 will run about as fast as an Athlon of the same clock speed (if you could get Athlons clocked at 3GHz).
I couldn't be bothered to read all of your post. Can you summarize it please?
(PS I am not American but it is true I just read like 1.63 sentences before skimming along to the next page of comments. The web probably affects attention span more than TV.)
That's what I meant, will the blade form factor become cheaper and more common.
If history is any guide, it's more likely that someone will come up with ATX-blade (a rack where you can fit several ATX motherboards) and that this will take over the server market from the low end upwards.
So are these things going to be available in other countries? Assuming the software is available (and it's Linux, so why not) then this thing could stomp on the Ipaq and other more expensive handhelds. At least for price-conscious buyers such as schools (the old Psion Series 3 and 3a had some success in British schools marketed as the Acorn Pocket Book - and it's a lot cheaper to buy ten of these handhelds for a classroom than a couple of PCs).
I wonder whether we will see a small blade housing being sold for desktop use. A box that sits under your desk and holds between one and four blades (possibly made to look like a single machine with MOSIX). In other words could the 'blade' form factor become a rival for ATX?
The restriction on YaST is that you cannot sell 'data carriers' containing the software. So for example you cannot sell CDs with a Linux distribution that contains YaST (SuSE Linux or otherwise). This seems a bit unreasonable from a company that makes its money selling CDs of software mostly written by others.
Still SuSE's policy is that patches to other programs are released under the same licence as the programs themselves, so they do good work in the rest of their distribution. But since YaST is a proprietary SuSE program, I can't really see the point in learning it (since it ties you to SuSE Linux and can never be used by the other distributions under the current licence). Better to support a distribution like Linux-Mandrake which makes sure its admin tools are released as free software.
YMMV, but at least you can appreciate the reasons why some users prefer to stay away from SuSE.
But considering the price premium that Intel charges for an extra 0.2GHz at the top of its range of processors, it might just be economical to get the expensive cooling system and a slightly slower-rated chip.
This is another way of saying that the prices charged for the very fastest CPUs are silly. But given that some people seem prepared to pay that much, a group of equally silly people would benefit from extreme cooling.
Heatsinks on the _inside_? How would that help? OK it might help a bit but surely you want to attach them to the outside of any hot component. Unfortunately I don't think PSUs are designed to dissipate heat through their casing so heatsinks on that wouldn't help much. I am rather reluctant to open up a PSU even when it's disconnected from the mains - it's the only part of a PC that can kill you.
AFAIK you do not run your monitor 'from' a power supply: the place to plug in a monitor cable is a simple pass-through and doesn't go via the PSU itself.
My power supply does get rather hot so I don't think I'll remove the fan from it. I did have a box with a broken AT power supply where the fan didn't work - it seemed okay. Maybe I should combine that with the fanless Pentium chip (or in fact, I think the fan on that broke too) and I'll be all set.
My goal is to make the computer as quiet as possible and the keyboard as loud as possible. After all the keyboard noise actually _means_ something and it's a real noise, not just a background drone.
I was doing quite well with this goal after I removed the fan from my processor heatsink (it was a P200, and seemed to not get too hot). Unfortunately I then upgraded to an Athlon (Palomino; probably the hottest chip currently sold, though not the fastest) and a fan has become necessary. A fanless power supply would be nice but I don't think they exist at the power levels today's PCs draw.
You're right, the way you order the disk seeks (elevator algorithm or whatever) can make a huge difference to the disk's performance. But I thought that average seek time was a purely physical measurement of how long it takes to do a single seek, from one part of the disk to another. Are you saying that average seek time is in fact computed by sending lots and lots of commands to the drive, letting it reorder them how it wishes, and seeing how long it takes until the last one is completed?
I'm pretty sure it's done by taking two spots on the disk, moving the head to one, and timing how long it takes to get to the next. This is certainly how ye olde disk benchmarks (Norton etc) used to compute the 'average' and 'maximum' seek time figures. The disk and controller did not have any scope to reorder the head movements because each test was done individually, after waiting for the previous one to finish.
Again, I didn't say seek performance, I said seek time. The performance you get in practice will depend both on the physical seek time and on how intelligent the software and firmware is in ordering reads/writes, as you mentioned.
I came to this article from a headline syndicated to Freshmeat. 'Berman retreats, only to regroup.'
Great, I thought!
As long as Piller goes with him, we might have the chance of a Trek sequel sometime in the next ten years that isn't clogged with mushy sentimentality and hackneyed plots. (This after watching the Berman/Piller scripted Insurrection on TV the other night.) Although that threat of regrouping is worrying... what dastardly new series does he plan? Will we see the same process with, say, Seinfeld: The Next Generation? So I clicked on the story to find out the bad news.
Imagine my relief when it just turned out to be some politician with his snout in the trough.
Imagine my relief when it
But 'phenomenon' would sound even better.
Normally I don't do this but this article by Cringely warrants an exception.
'phenomenae'. What a cretin.
Are you expected to trust the rest of the article after that?
The seek time of a hard disk is a physical property of the head, how fast it can move to a particular track. You could buy one of those slow parallel port disk attachments and the seek time would be just the same as with IDE or SCSI or Fibre Channel or whatever. It doesn't mean that the system's performance will be the same whatever the interface, but I didn't say that. I was talking about the seek time.
Bizarre. Perhaps your compiler's i486 optimizations are worse than useless. Sorry, I don't know how to change X's compiler options.