As a software developer whose experience goes back more than 40 years, to the Stanford Time-Sharing System on the DEC PDP-1, I can assure you that the only way to keep the kernel API from changing is to kill the project. Just as you wouldn't expect a driver written for Microsoft's MS-DOS to be effective on a modern NUMA machine, you shouldn't expect any driver interface standardized today to be effective 10 or 20 years from now. An attempt to freeze the driver API would hamstring the kernel developers, making the kernel less interesting to work on. Somebody would fork it, to lift the compatibility restriction, and the new kernel would work much better with modern computers, causing everyone to migrate to it.
The only way to keep Linux relavent it to let it evolve. Yes, that creates a burden on driver writers. Linux has a partial solution: keep your drivers in the kernel source tree, and test each kernel to be sure your driver still works. When it breaks the cause should be obvious, and easily fixed. If you are lucky, the person who changed the API will also update your driver, but you can't count on that, which is why you must test.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
on
CRIA Falling Apart?
·
· Score: 1
...who knows what great works might be lost - not from me, maybe, but from the next Mozart or whatever - just because the person who might have made them had to go work in a fast food joint to pay the bills.
That is the way art is, and I don't know how to make it better without undesirable side effects. Supporting art out of general taxation tends to support artists who agree with the current government, since government administers the tax revenue, and degenerates into tax support for re-electing the incumbents. Charging a fee to those who use other's art, and sending that fee to the creators (as is done by ASCAP and BMI) only benefits well-established artists; it does little to encourage creativity in new artists.
Take myself as an example. I love live theatre, but I have none of the traditional theatre talents: I cannot act, take direction, memorize lines, sing, dance, or direct others. I could just be a member of the audience, but I wanted more than that, so I found myself a niche that didn't depend on the talents I don't have: I do sound effects and sound reinforcement. Over the years I have acquired lots of toys for making interesting noises, and some good wireless microphones. I put a lot of time into the rehearsals and performances, and as a result my theatre friends have accepted me, though I think they find me a little strange. In the last play I did, the director realized as we were building the set that she didn't have a certain prop that she needed, so I volunteered to play a part that required me to cover myself in gold and hold still for 16 minutes.
I have never expected to be paid for my theatre work, nor have my theatre friends. We all do it for the love of the art. The audience members pay, but those payments go first to the production costs, including permission to produce copyrighted plays, and then to the local school system to provide additional education. For productions in which we don't have to pay for using the script (Shakespeare) and we don't have to pay for the performance space (a public park) we don't charge admission. I don't see anything wrong with that, and I intend to continue my theatre hobby for as long as I can push a slider on a sound mixer.
That's fine for people like me, but what about people with real talent? Shouldn't they be able to pursue their art full time? I think there is a lesson to be learned from former government officials. When you are a high-profile person who cannot work for the government because the wrong party won the last election, you make money on the lecture circuit. Similarly, artists could speak to groups of fans, sign autographs, lend their names to merchansise, endorse brands, etc. If you are popular, you can make a living doing this, and thus spend most of your time creating art. Yes, this is only good for well-established artists, but how else than popularity can we decide which artists should get public support?
Better learn to like that parallel programming stuff. It's the way things work.
I can echo that. I have been doing programming on parallel CPUs since 1968 (on a monstrosity at Stanford University that included a 166 and a KA-10 processor). You have to think differently to write parallel code, but once you learn to think that way it becomes no harder than conventional, “linear” programming.
I was renting a movie one day when a boy—maybe 12—and his parents approached the counter next to me. The boy put a game on the counter, the clerk scanned it, and said “You are aware that this game is rated M for violence and sexual content?” The father turned to his son and asked “is that okay?” then said “fine” when his son nodded. I don't think that guy had a clue what he'd just been asked, I wanted to slap him.
I wasn't the father you saw, but I could easily have been. Here is the situation as I imagine it from the father's point of view. The parents take their son to the video game rental shop to rent him a game as a treat, perhaps because he brought home a good report card, or did well in sports at school. He has heard about this particular game, and picks it from the rack. The parents look over the cover and decide, in spite of the M rating, that it is appropriate for him. At the counter the father, hearing the question from the clerk, is concerned that his son might be embarrased to have porn. When the son indicates he is OK with it, the transaction is completed.
That's San Rafael, not San Rafeal. A sidenote on place names: Skywalker Ranch was located in Lucas Valley, but the valley had its name long before George located there.
In 1963, when IBM was still firmly committed to variable length records on disks, DEC was shipping a block-replacable personal storage device called the DECtape. This consisted of a wide magnetic tape wrapped around a wheel small enough to fit in your pocket. Unlike the much larger IBM-compatible tape drives, DECtape drives could write a block in the middle of the tape without disturbing other blocks, so it was in effect a slow disk. To make block replacement possible all blocks had to be the same size, and on the PDP-6 DEC set the size to 128 36-bit words, or 4608 bits. This number (or 4096, a rounder number for 8-bit computers) carried over into later disks which also used fixed sector sizes. As time passed, there were occasional discussions about the proper sector size, but at least once the argument to keep it small won based on the desire to avoid wasting space within a sector, since the last sector of a file would on average be only half full.
A product like MySQL (or any database product) does not have to be closed source to be coupled with a closed source application. Define a formal, arms-length interface to the product and you can let closed-source applications use it through the interface. Linux does this by defining the system call interface. A database product can do it through SQL.
In addition, it is possible to make money from an open source product by offering services.
I remember how SP2 was supposed to be some sort of security godsend, and when I first tried to install it it BSOD'd my computer every startup until I reformatted & reinstalled windows.
Probably, your computer was infected with something like a rootkit that
tried to take over the machine on startup to conceal itself. Installing SP2
likely changed the system enough that the rootkit's patches were invalid, giving you the BSOD. By reformatting you removed the malware, so SP2 did its job.
Well, Google is still young. I'm fairly sure it will eventually enter middle age and the engineers will be replaced by marketing. Then when it gets old, the marketeers will be replaced by lawyers. It is just a question of time, years, or even decades.
I am sure you are right, because I have seen it happen. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was founded in 1959 by a couple of engineers. When I became aware of the company in 1963 it still had an engineering culture: the engineers ran the show, and the sales people were secondary. Somewhere around 1968, they renamed the programmers "software engineers" to give them more prestige.
As the company matured the culture changed. Even though I worked for DEC from 1975 to 1992, I cannot point to a specific event that was the watershed. The first symptom that I noticed was that the KS10 was said to be developed in secret to prevent it from being cancelled. Even if that wasn't true, the fact that engineers believed it indicates that the engineers no longer felt that they were making the decisions.
I wonder if paying commissions to the sales people was a symptom or a cause.
I don't blame the demise of Digital entirely on the shift from an engineering focus to a sales focus. There were some bad decisions made by engineering in the last few years. But I can't help wondering if those decisions might have been corrected more quickly by a younger company.
Strangely, IBM appears to be a counter-example. They are by far the oldest computer company, but they seem to have achieved some sort of dynamic equilibrium, where they are able to change direction as technology and markets change quickly enough to survive. I am sure some of that has to do with their size, but as General Motors reminds us, size is no guarantee of survival. I suppose they have internal institutions that keep them nimble.
There are some good books on Digital Equipment Corporation. See
The Ultimate Entrepreneur for the story of DEC at its height, and
DEC is Dead Long, Live DEC for a look back after its death. John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
planting trees versus carbon dioxide emissions
on
New Server Chip Niagara
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
...would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees.
I hope everyone realizes that planting one million trees has no effect on carbon dioxide emissions. Trees absorb carbon dioxide as part of the photosynthesis cycle, they don't emit it. John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
what you describe reminds me of the RMS versioning that the ODS filesystem on OpenVMS uses. But due to its closes source nature its difficult to tell wether its actualy writing a copy of the whole file or as you said, a delta of the changes. I would be interestred to know just how it was done myself.
The file versioning was actually in ODS-2, not in RMS. Creating a new file by the same name as an existing file would increment the version number, which was part of the file name. For example, if you edit file.txt.1 the result would be file.txt.2. The new file contained the complete contents; you could delete file.txt.1 without disturbing file.txt.2.
John Sauter, former DEC software engineer, (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Its great to see a drive thats not actually half a terrabyte (because 1024/2 = 512 != 500)....
Actually, if the photograph in the article is accurate, it is just over half a terrabyte. The label on the drive claims it has 976,733,168 blocks. At 512 bytes per block that's 500,087,382,016 bytes.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
I regret that I do not know Ralph. As best I can remember, I never met him, and I am sure that if I had met him, I would have showed him Spacewar.
I remain very interested in early video games, hence my purchase of the book. Congratulations on finding a good way to let potential customers know about it.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
I brought Steve Russell's Spacewar to Sanders in the early 1970s, and installed it on the PDP-1 in the basement. When Nintendo was contesting the Magnavox patents they couldn't find any evidence that Baer had seen or played Spacewar, but the possibility does exist, since they were in the same building at the same time. Does he say in his book whether or not he ever encountered Spacewar>
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
All I can say is that Intel would have to be increadibly braindead to even think about trying to get people to switch to the Itanium instruction set after the embarresment of the AMD64 fiasco. They must be using the AMD64 instruction set. In fact, since they have a slide that shows Windows XP 64bit compatibility, I'm going to say that I will eat one of my iguanna's (not my best one though) if they are using the Itanic instruction set and not AMD64.
Keep in mind that Microsoft Windows does support Itanium.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Does anybody know what instruction set these three new processors implement? The article states that these are 64-bit CPUs, but doesn't say whether they feature the AMD64 or the Itanium instruction set.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
We do forbid re-use of passwords, and make you wait a minimum of two days after changing your password to change it again, but we have no textual requirements other than it must not be in the "easy to guess" words list.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
In my shop passwords expire in 120 days. There is a constant, low level of complaint, but the users are accustomed to it and so don't complain too loudly. The only person who has to change his password in more than one place when it expires is me.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
If you were some overworked patent clerk facing an ARMY of well-paid, well-funded and determined MS lawyers are you so sure you'd be able to stand up to them?
Yes. If I couldn't I should resign or be fired. Standing up to lawyers is a patent clerk's job.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
The problem with that is that open DRM is an oxymoron. If it's open it can be bypassed. DRM works only if there is a secret component that can't be bypassed to get at the raw data, and that inevitably means that access to the implementations of it has to be covered by restrictive NDA's.
All DRM schemes can be bypassed by technical means, so making them open doesn't decrease their effectiveness. The enforcement mechanism is legal, so the owner has a cause of action against anyone who violates his rights. The purpose of DRM is to decrease "schoolyard copying" to an acceptable level.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
...But we will stick with our DECnet-based VAX and Alpha clusters because they are known to work, and they work pretty damn well! But that's because it is amongst the finest of DEC engineering. That's the sort of engineering you just don't find these days.
Thank you.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net), a former DEC software engineer who worked on DECnet
When I visit the Wal*Mart in Amherst, New Hampshire, or the one near Troy, New York, I can print my data files without supervision. I feed my CD-R or SD card to a magic box, interact with it through its screen, and in a few minutes I have 4 by 6 or 8 by 10 prints. No Wal*Mart employee has an opportunity to reject my pictures because they are "too good."
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Slashdot Mirror
As a software developer whose experience goes back more than 40 years, to the Stanford Time-Sharing System on the DEC PDP-1, I can assure you that the only way to keep the kernel API from changing is to kill the project. Just as you wouldn't expect a driver written for Microsoft's MS-DOS to be effective on a modern NUMA machine, you shouldn't expect any driver interface standardized today to be effective 10 or 20 years from now. An attempt to freeze the driver API would hamstring the kernel developers, making the kernel less interesting to work on. Somebody would fork it, to lift the compatibility restriction, and the new kernel would work much better with modern computers, causing everyone to migrate to it.
The only way to keep Linux relavent it to let it evolve. Yes, that creates a burden on driver writers. Linux has a partial solution: keep your drivers in the kernel source tree, and test each kernel to be sure your driver still works. When it breaks the cause should be obvious, and easily fixed. If you are lucky, the person who changed the API will also update your driver, but you can't count on that, which is why you must test.
That is the way art is, and I don't know how to make it better without undesirable side effects. Supporting art out of general taxation tends to support artists who agree with the current government, since government administers the tax revenue, and degenerates into tax support for re-electing the incumbents. Charging a fee to those who use other's art, and sending that fee to the creators (as is done by ASCAP and BMI) only benefits well-established artists; it does little to encourage creativity in new artists.
Take myself as an example. I love live theatre, but I have none of the traditional theatre talents: I cannot act, take direction, memorize lines, sing, dance, or direct others. I could just be a member of the audience, but I wanted more than that, so I found myself a niche that didn't depend on the talents I don't have: I do sound effects and sound reinforcement. Over the years I have acquired lots of toys for making interesting noises, and some good wireless microphones. I put a lot of time into the rehearsals and performances, and as a result my theatre friends have accepted me, though I think they find me a little strange. In the last play I did, the director realized as we were building the set that she didn't have a certain prop that she needed, so I volunteered to play a part that required me to cover myself in gold and hold still for 16 minutes.
I have never expected to be paid for my theatre work, nor have my theatre friends. We all do it for the love of the art. The audience members pay, but those payments go first to the production costs, including permission to produce copyrighted plays, and then to the local school system to provide additional education. For productions in which we don't have to pay for using the script (Shakespeare) and we don't have to pay for the performance space (a public park) we don't charge admission. I don't see anything wrong with that, and I intend to continue my theatre hobby for as long as I can push a slider on a sound mixer.
That's fine for people like me, but what about people with real talent? Shouldn't they be able to pursue their art full time? I think there is a lesson to be learned from former government officials. When you are a high-profile person who cannot work for the government because the wrong party won the last election, you make money on the lecture circuit. Similarly, artists could speak to groups of fans, sign autographs, lend their names to merchansise, endorse brands, etc. If you are popular, you can make a living doing this, and thus spend most of your time creating art. Yes, this is only good for well-established artists, but how else than popularity can we decide which artists should get public support?
I can echo that. I have been doing programming on parallel CPUs since 1968 (on a monstrosity at Stanford University that included a 166 and a KA-10 processor). You have to think differently to write parallel code, but once you learn to think that way it becomes no harder than conventional, “linear” programming.
I wasn't the father you saw, but I could easily have been. Here is the situation as I imagine it from the father's point of view. The parents take their son to the video game rental shop to rent him a game as a treat, perhaps because he brought home a good report card, or did well in sports at school. He has heard about this particular game, and picks it from the rack. The parents look over the cover and decide, in spite of the M rating, that it is appropriate for him. At the counter the father, hearing the question from the clerk, is concerned that his son might be embarrased to have porn. When the son indicates he is OK with it, the transaction is completed.
That's San Rafael, not San Rafeal. A sidenote on place names: Skywalker Ranch was located in Lucas Valley, but the valley had its name long before George located there.
In 1963, when IBM was still firmly committed to variable length records on disks, DEC was shipping a block-replacable personal storage device called the DECtape. This consisted of a wide magnetic tape wrapped around a wheel small enough to fit in your pocket. Unlike the much larger IBM-compatible tape drives, DECtape drives could write a block in the middle of the tape without disturbing other blocks, so it was in effect a slow disk. To make block replacement possible all blocks had to be the same size, and on the PDP-6 DEC set the size to 128 36-bit words, or 4608 bits. This number (or 4096, a rounder number for 8-bit computers) carried over into later disks which also used fixed sector sizes. As time passed, there were occasional discussions about the proper sector size, but at least once the argument to keep it small won based on the desire to avoid wasting space within a sector, since the last sector of a file would on average be only half full.
A product like MySQL (or any database product) does not have to be closed source to be coupled with a closed source application. Define a formal, arms-length interface to the product and you can let closed-source applications use it through the interface. Linux does this by defining the system call interface. A database product can do it through SQL.
In addition, it is possible to make money from an open source product by offering services.
Probably, your computer was infected with something like a rootkit that tried to take over the machine on startup to conceal itself. Installing SP2 likely changed the system enough that the rootkit's patches were invalid, giving you the BSOD. By reformatting you removed the malware, so SP2 did its job.
I am sure you are right, because I have seen it happen. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was founded in 1959 by a couple of engineers. When I became aware of the company in 1963 it still had an engineering culture: the engineers ran the show, and the sales people were secondary. Somewhere around 1968, they renamed the programmers "software engineers" to give them more prestige.
As the company matured the culture changed. Even though I worked for DEC from 1975 to 1992, I cannot point to a specific event that was the watershed. The first symptom that I noticed was that the KS10 was said to be developed in secret to prevent it from being cancelled. Even if that wasn't true, the fact that engineers believed it indicates that the engineers no longer felt that they were making the decisions.
I wonder if paying commissions to the sales people was a symptom or a cause.
I don't blame the demise of Digital entirely on the shift from an engineering focus to a sales focus. There were some bad decisions made by engineering in the last few years. But I can't help wondering if those decisions might have been corrected more quickly by a younger company.
Strangely, IBM appears to be a counter-example. They are by far the oldest computer company, but they seem to have achieved some sort of dynamic equilibrium, where they are able to change direction as technology and markets change quickly enough to survive. I am sure some of that has to do with their size, but as General Motors reminds us, size is no guarantee of survival. I suppose they have internal institutions that keep them nimble.
There are some good books on Digital Equipment Corporation. See The Ultimate Entrepreneur for the story of DEC at its height, and DEC is Dead Long, Live DEC for a look back after its death.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
I hope your CLEANUP.COM used the PURGE DCL command.
John Sauter, former EDT project leader, (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
John Sauter, former DEC software engineer, (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Hard to believe that Neil Armstrong was not familiar with Lunar Surveyor. See http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/survey
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
I remain very interested in early video games, hence my purchase of the book. Congratulations on finding a good way to let potential customers know about it.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
I brought Steve Russell's Spacewar to Sanders in the early 1970s, and installed it on the PDP-1 in the basement. When Nintendo was contesting the Magnavox patents they couldn't find any evidence that Baer had seen or played Spacewar, but the possibility does exist, since they were in the same building at the same time. Does he say in his book whether or not he ever encountered Spacewar>
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Does anybody know what instruction set these three new processors implement? The article states that these are 64-bit CPUs, but doesn't say whether they feature the AMD64 or the Itanium instruction set.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
We do forbid re-use of passwords, and make you wait a minimum of two days after changing your password to change it again, but we have no textual requirements other than it must not be in the "easy to guess" words list.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
In my shop passwords expire in 120 days. There is a constant, low level of complaint, but the users are accustomed to it and so don't complain too loudly. The only person who has to change his password in more than one place when it expires is me.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
I neither own nor run Empire.Net; I am just a customer.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net), a former DEC software engineer who worked on DECnet
When I visit the Wal*Mart in Amherst, New Hampshire, or the one near Troy, New York, I can print my data files without supervision. I feed my CD-R or SD card to a magic box, interact with it through its screen, and in a few minutes I have 4 by 6 or 8 by 10 prints. No Wal*Mart employee has an opportunity to reject my pictures because they are "too good."
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)