but wonder if he has an angle that might have a slim chance of prevailing
Put any issue like this in a court, especially in front of a jury, especially in America, and literally anything can happen, regardless of the lawyers or facts on either side.
Juries will do what they think is justice based upon what they think they understand.
Saying that SCO's case is lost, or this one would not stand a chance is simply not legitimate. Many experienced legal commentators seem to tend to give either side in just about any major case a 50-50 chance of winning. That is why the smartest thing you can do is to figure out how to stay out of court, unless you are evil and rich and like injustice. Over the long haul it may get corrected, but the courtroom is a roll of the dice.
That is also probably why jury-tried issues carry little if any weight as legal precedence. While it would be very incorrect to say that the facts are irrelevant, it would also be very incorrect to say that they will carry the day or that this or any other issue could not be won in court, especially before a jury.
Do the new models replace or confuse old ones?
on
A Review of GCC 4.0
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree that this compiler is a cornerstone of free software.
But it was very frustrating to me to try to port the compiler to a new platform by modifying existing back ends for similar platforms.
After spending a few months on it (m68k in this case), I could not escape the layers of hack upon cruft upon hack upon cruft, that made it extremely difficult to make even fairly superficial mods because everyone seemed to be using the features differently and all the power seemed lost in hacks that made it impossible to do simple things (for me anyway). I am quite familiar with many assemblers and optimizing compilers.
I hope that the new work makes a somewhat-clean break with the old, otherwise, I would fear yet another layer to be hacked and interwoven, with the other ones that were so poorly fit to the back ends.
I suspect that not all backends are the same and perhaps the same experience would not be true for a more-popular target, but it seems to me it shouldn't be that hard to create a model that is more powerful yet more simple. Such would seem to me to be a major step forward and enable much greateer optimization, utilization, maintainability, etc.
I would travel that fast too, or faster, on that road. That says nothing whatsoever about whether they were traveling that fast at that time or whether they slowed, as was apparently claimed. Perhaps they would like to cite what the average speed of other non-US vehicles at the same observed points was. It is easy to make data say whatever you like, as that would start to be more-relevant, but still far from really establishing any fact. Oh I forgot, the data is classified, so they can make it say whatever they like with no review, as the US has done repeatedly in Iraq.
It can't be long now that we noticed the lens of the Vorgon sighting device. Are you sure those are galaxies on the other side, and not the twinkling of a charging energy device of a demolition crew?
If you include ignoring the standard definition and doing whatever you please, yes, they read it. By that definition, my toaster reads it, too.
Do you really think they wanted to control the browser market for any purpose than to destroy it, because it was free and open?
Unfortunately for them, even after abandoning their users and code base for several years after they thought their opposition was dead, they find they have to come back to it once in a while.
If they would implement and support W3C and other standards, as well as reputable browser vendors do, it would be a start.
Name a good software company that has had a serious relationship with Microsoft as a competitor and has come off better over a 5-year period as a result of trying to cooperate with them (OK, IBM lasted a bit longer, but most are dead).
IBM has demonstrated any number of ways of showing some level of cooperation with the open or free software communities. Apple, too, has earned some good karma, basing their OS and browser on open code and architecture, even if they keep a lot proprietary. Sun has been involved as well, and it hasn't kept them from keeping other things private. So why can't Microsoft think of something like most other major companies have, without calling a conference of competitors that sounds too much like looking for a target to attack, much like SCO's supposed invitation to IBM and the open source community to sit down and work things out?
Stop being so evil. Microsoft has enough money in the bank to be able to afford business ethics and earn trust.
The reason I (and many others, I'm sure) switched from Alta Vista to Google was that Google consistently returned the results I wanted when given a simple query. AV would generally require me to build a relatively complicated expression (often in several iterations) to get good results. Google just needed a word or two. Google's idea of using links to rate page's value ("PageRank") was a brilliant innovation.
I use Google today as much as the next person for simple queries where I want to be advertised to or there is one quite-public company to be found
The statement "and many others, I'm sure" is vague enough to fit almost any possible set of circumstances, even if it were only a fraction of a percent of those who switched and never go back. It may have been the reason for many who never figured out the value of an accurate powerful search capability. But it completely neglects another reason for those who did value the capabilities:
Altavista discontinued almost every capability that made them such a good search engine, and it has been many years since I could recommend them on any basis to anyone except just as an alternative that will give a different set of results. It seems that Google is perhaps: not willing, not able, or not aware of the value of a better search capability for power users. Are they afraid their advertisers won't rise to the top? Is there any other alternative I missed? None of them are things I would like to believe about Google which has many positives as a company, but where's the state-of-the-art technology when we need something besides a website popularity contest?
Perhaps I sound trollish, because I have taken the time to describe things politely and repeatedly in great depth for Google for many years and have never even receive an acknowledgement that there is anyone who thinks this sort of thing would be valuable. This feels like an attitude of "We're Google and you are not", rather than of community -- the same silent treatment I got from AltaVista as they made themselves less and less valuable and I let them know about it, asking for them to restore features. Thus, Google deserves to lose market share, as Altavista did, to anyone who does something better for a significant portion of users who are not being well-served now, in which I include myself. There is so much more that could be done.
I have no real desire for Microsoft to succeed in this area because I do not trust them with the power they have now. If they serve to jog Google into action that benefits me with the basic ability to search the internet better, then they served a useful function. If they are trying hardest just to be another Google, then ultimately it probably doesn't matter too much which one is declared winner.
Altavista may have had some nice functions, but Google returns much more useful results. There is a reason pretty much everyone stopped using Altavista you know.
For you, perhaps. Especially for those without a clue how to really search, so the best they can hope for is the most-popular thing that the most other sites are linking to.
But then please don't go complaining about spam when you are not willing to use or have available a more-intelligent search capability to find exactly what you are after.
What you wind up with is only good for advertisers and manipulators.
It seems to be trendy on/. to bash Google these days if there were any real criticism, maybe they would be motivated. What I see is a community that believes they can do no wrong and Oohs and Ahhs about non-innovations like web-based email and public text projects subverted to their commercial purposes. How about improving search?
people switched because it was the best overall. That seems to have forced Yahoo to improve as well.
Your world must be extremely one-dimensional to believe, in Panglossian fashion, that "best overall" is even a definable metric, or that it will naturally arise from the marketplace.
We are far better served by numerous independent innovators which we had at least to some degree until AltaVista was repeatedly sold and repeatedly downgraded their capabilities. If the best business business model is for them to show you what they and their advertisers want you to see, combined with the 1% most-popular that rises to the top by counting links, how is that better in any sense? Intelligent people are usually looking for needles in haystacks, not for the dross that rises to the top or could have been found by guessing domain names.
Even now, AltaVista frequently will give me much that I cannot get from Google, and I would even call "dogpile.com" a much greater and more-useful innovation than Google ever offered (beyond their first idea that searching was a popularity contest, which is sometimes true for the masses), drawing and combining results from different search engines to avoid the single Google slant.
I would start using it, if it offered better searches for the person who didn't just want to know who got linked to the most from outside. Where is the indication of what they think is "at least as good"? Two very different approaches, instead of two that can be spammed using the same technique, would be refreshing.
FWIW, the "near me" button is nothing like the "near" capabiliity allowing the nearness of one keyword to another to be specified for a match (Altavista seems to have lost this and many other capabilities once Yahoo bought them out).
And they probably had far better OS utilization of the 64 bit architecture with their VMS or Unix. So what.
They also had much better capability and accuracy, allowing you to search for exactly what you wanted, not just what was most popular, allowing things like the near keyword, partial word wildcarding, and many more.
Why don't we ever hear of better search capabilities, instead of nearly-meaningless hardware shifts. The market has stagnated under Google who can't figure out how to offer even as good a search as their competitors offered at the time they launched.
The thing posing the greatest risk are the sorts of things which have already brought two shuttles, or the astronaughts have been quite unnaturally lucky in the many flights.
It has been some years ago, but I saw both WordPerfect and Corel Draw running well on NT on Alpha at CeBit in Hanover. So what?
NT was a 32-bit operation, even on Alpha. VMS and Unix, on the other hand, supported real 64-bit applications, memory management, etc. at the time. Then and now, I couldn't care less about Windows running on the hardware because there was no discernable difference in the products for all the effort (at the time I still occasionally ran Windows so I might have cared, which I do not today).
Selling 64 bits was/is like selling the hydrogen car. It is of significant value, but getting the masses to move requires considerable compatibility with the existing infrastructure, and most will judge it on criteria of not what it could be but how well it runs their existing apps.
If you have never used anything but IE before, I can imagine you somehow feeling that IE served users' needs.
A short list that is more than a year old is found here.
Anyone with a lot of knowledge of both products or the products of other browser makers could come up with many more significant differences. It is horrible to have a Windows user telling of all his problems pleading you to come help and then you are forced to stumble through the web with IE for him because he is too short-sighted to use anything else. That is why he is on Windows with all the problems in the first place, because he was incapable of good analysis.
If IE had never existed, the World Wide Web experience of the user would be just as universal and far richer. If Netscape or others had never existed, it would be far poorer. That is the bottom line, however you want to define the success or failure of technology that has nothing to do with solid technology. What did Microsoft contribute... Active X? There is a real winner. Broken/incompetent standards support to make pages only work in IE if written by IE users? Security holes galore, generally not present in the other browsers? A monoculture (even if the technology had been good, this is a bad thing). Declaring IE a technological success is a statement about you. At Microsoft, the only real success is something that can be abused to dominate, and a rusty, infected blade seems to be of more use to them in surgury to threaten the patient than a good one, so define success in their terms if you like.
From a technological standpoint, IE is quite bad. But from a business perspective, it could be Hello World, and it would be successful, as the years of Microsoft dominance with very bad products shows.
Or is Chinese communism an unqualified success because it serves so many people.
Usually a plan and design shows how to get to the first basic requirements while having a model that can support most directions the person is willing to go. It is the fundamental/abstract model that has to be carefully established, not the details of every part of the implementation.
Burning $15 million says nothing about why the plan failed or if it failed.
Unfortunately, better technology often has little to do with business success, but I find it not a compelling argument for the crap we see many companies put out that does not meet basic reasonable requirements.
If success is defined by your bottom line, go join Microsoft who can put anyone out of business and steal their designs without expending any effort or advancing the industry or market.
By your criteria, Internet Explorer in any version more-widely-deployed than non-IE browsers is the better browser. I disagree. I do not consider Microsoft a success, because they do little or nothing to advance the art, and destroy it in many ways. Or we should all give up programming and become IP sharks and unethical bullies. I have no use for their work, and they are extremely antisocial, however profitable they are.
On the other hand, years of thought and discussion don't help at all without a certain amount of experience trying to implement the project.
Certainly without experience at all, it is hopeless so if you employ people with no practical experience in the domain, I guess producing something worthless is no worse than what they did at the University. Of course, without planning and design, the experience is often completely wasted, and I watch companies go into cycle after cycle making exactly the same mistakes because without careful analysis, creating a model, etc. they learned nothing, and they blame everyone but themselves because they didn't write any incriminating principles to follow in the first place.
You don't find out until you try to write the code what exactly the issues that you're trying to plan to avoid are.
Perhaps you should speak for yourself. I can imagine that some people are poor at avoiding problems by thinking ahead, but I have great success that way. A well understood abstract model is far less error-prone than spaghetti code with no forethought or put together by team members each pursuing a different vision. If evolution were the best way to design things, perhaps we should just wait for evolution to do it, but I prefer to use my brain to model in advance, which is the one thing the brain does well -- otherwise we might as well just be single-celled organisms.
If you try to plan before coding at all, you come up with something like EJB, which very elegantly solves problems which don't exist, and doesn't work for reasons that don't impact theory.
This arises from diving into a project without understanding requirements, not from studying ways of fulfilling requirements. Your extreme position that any planning before coding is wasted effort is not supported by any experience I have ever had on any project.
The most reliable approach, in my opinion, is to start coding without any planning at all. It won't work, but when you then go into the planning phase, you'll have some clue as to what the pitfalls are that you have to avoid (as well as what things turn out not to be a problem). Then you can write a version that actually works somewhat. There will be new problems and things you didn't get to trying in the first failed attempt, so you'll need a redesign. After a few iterations, you'll have something that's simple and solid.
That is the Extreme Programming myth that things will just fall together that way, and if you are lucky with a good programmer or small team and simple project, it may.
Unfortunately, reality seldom works out that way in my experience. You get something that seems to work without realizing the basic inconsistencies in the self-competing fragmented model. Management refuses to throw away the code since it superficially seems to work (superficial design, superficial results). And you go into a mode where you are spending all your time trying to make up for things that the model does not provide, which will never get near the consistency of a simple original design, so the model just gets worse as you go on.
My personal bias is that you should assume that your project is going to fail and have a lot of scavengable parts, such that your future projects will have a high chance of success (or, at least, start out further ahead).
If you are employing people with no domain expertise or process to obtain such, perhaps, but coding is not necessarily the best way to foster domain expertise, even if it is the only successful method you have ever pursued.
I have lots of evidence of failed projects due to failure to plan.
It can take months or years of thought and discussion to reasonably avoid extreme catastrophies.
While it is silly to try to plan every detail and anyone who claims to do so is lying, a simple elegant, successful general approach is seldom the first one to pop into the head. It takes a lot of thought. Of course, for those incapable of such forethought, why not fail earlier rather than later.
Often the GPL is used as "Version 2 or any later version." Many people have their important projects under that sort of license. It takes a minor change for next versions of the GPL to require that GPL software only be used in conjunction with other GPL software, which is what Stallman invisions with the HURD. It's another small change to require that all subsequent versions of the program fall under the GPL, which would also work well for Stallman...
In order for that to EVER take effect, the software authors would have to remove the clause that allows usage under GPL version 2.
Part of the GPL's power comes from the fact that if you license your software under the GPL, you are assigning copyright to the FSF so that they can defend it with their money/lawyers.
Try reading the GPL rather than making such wild unfounded statements. Nowhere does it assign copyright to FSF.
While the types of things you suggest can occur without the GPL, they cannot with the GPL version 2 or anything now distributed under that license.
They can fork at any time such a hypothetical oppressive move were made. But you seem to ignore that possibility entirely saying they would have to roll their own.
There are enough people that believe that the license IS important that this will not happen.
Funny how people try to spin so many conspiracy theories around RMS while ignoring the real conspiracies everywhere else. Read the GPL a bit more carefully to understand what it does.
I do not deny big RMS and FSF contributions to GCC, glibc, and of course the GPL. Yes, they get (part of) the ball rolling. But this does not justify their requests to use the term "GNU/Linux". DEC's (and X Consortium) contribution was of the same magnitude, because without the good graphical interface Linux (and any of *BSDs) would be nowhere near the current state. Yet they do not demand the term "xc/Linux" should be used.
But I would still be happily using the free software I have, and who knows what technical advancements would have replaced them. I used and valued DEC software long before there was a GUI, and the GUI isn't the indispensible piece for me that you seem to think it is, even assuming nothing else would have taken it's place. Believe me, DEC's GUIs were never worth writing home about. I do not run a GUI on my most important systems today, which is freedom that free software gives me with no contribution from DEC. DEC wrote all kinds of wonderful compilers as well as operating systems but were never philanthropic enough to allow me to use them freely. The UI was not much of an intentional contribution which you would understand if you ever licensed software from them, including their DEC adaptations of the UI.
DEC's contribution was at most a technical contribution to a narrow part of the system. I do not find this comparable to the FSF contribution.
Linus already gets all the credit, some of which he deserves for the kernel. Alan Cox contributes under his Linux kernel banner. Linus does not seem to value freedom and GPL (based upon past actions) to the extent it is merited. And what does the Apache Foundation have to do at all with Linux distributions or free software?
While the Linux kernel may be substitutable, I have never found the GPL, GNU utilities and other things as substitutable.
Linus seems to believe that the technology is more important than the freedom (as he has clearly expressed WRT bitkeeper and on many other occasions), which is part of why they tend to undervalue the GNU contribution. I suspect Linus is coming to value it a bit more with the SCO nonsense.
That is why I respect the idea that being forced to use non-free software where reasonable alternatives exist could easily be reason enough to change jobs.
How on earth could a credible threat be made against a free software developer? Details, please. If he was receiving benefits or consideration from the FSF or the FSF was offering something, then it is appropriate that FSF has some say in what he does. Otherwise, as I told Darl McBride to his face, what part of the GPL don't you get? How does it make it possible to threaten someone and force them to work in a direction they do not believe to be of value?
Freedom is the most important aspect of these projects. While good things should follow, having the freedom to fork, as GCC and glibc and others have done when the originators stagnated is what I would interpret as RMS/FSF's most important contribution.
If they recognize the changes as good and accept them back into their code base, that is their right, and that is how free software projects work.
Richard Stallman never said he personally wrote the code all by himself, any more than the creators of a Redhat, Mandrake, Debian distribution who slap their names on the collection do, even though the RMS/FSF contribution to the code and project that created them was in my view clearly superior to that of Redhat, for example, even if I think his personal judgement on EMacs UI and many other things does not produce a product I want to use. The key is I can fix it or choose to substitute something else.
His desire to attach the GNU name is, again, the desire to teach about the free software nature of some basic building blocks there, which he consideres the most significant aspect of the software. What other name would convey the spirit of freedom like GNU? Others contributions, while valuable, are technical except for their choice to follow the GNU lead and code under the banner and license of free software.
It does work, exactly in the way the legislators ultimately mean for it to work, destroying competition. Please elaborate how you think it could be revised to increase rather than destroy competition.
Should be more popular than flight insurance since it is more-likely to kill you. I insure you for a modest fee against a civilization-ending event, (assuming there are survivors and insurers surviving to work out the details of collection -- but then if there were survivors it wasn't civilization-ending, now was it).
Slashdot Mirror
but wonder if he has an angle that might have a slim chance of prevailing
Put any issue like this in a court, especially in front of a jury, especially in America, and literally anything can happen, regardless of the lawyers or facts on either side.
Juries will do what they think is justice based upon what they think they understand.
Saying that SCO's case is lost, or this one would not stand a chance is simply not legitimate. Many experienced legal commentators seem to tend to give either side in just about any major case a 50-50 chance of winning. That is why the smartest thing you can do is to figure out how to stay out of court, unless you are evil and rich and like injustice. Over the long haul it may get corrected, but the courtroom is a roll of the dice.
That is also probably why jury-tried issues carry little if any weight as legal precedence. While it would be very incorrect to say that the facts are irrelevant, it would also be very incorrect to say that they will carry the day or that this or any other issue could not be won in court, especially before a jury.
I agree that this compiler is a cornerstone of free software.
But it was very frustrating to me to try to port the compiler to a new platform by modifying existing back ends for similar platforms.
After spending a few months on it (m68k in this case), I could not escape the layers of hack upon cruft upon hack upon cruft, that made it extremely difficult to make even fairly superficial mods because everyone seemed to be using the features differently and all the power seemed lost in hacks that made it impossible to do simple things (for me anyway). I am quite familiar with many assemblers and optimizing compilers.
I hope that the new work makes a somewhat-clean break with the old, otherwise, I would fear yet another layer to be hacked and interwoven, with the other ones that were so poorly fit to the back ends.
I suspect that not all backends are the same and perhaps the same experience would not be true for a more-popular target, but it seems to me it shouldn't be that hard to create a model that is more powerful yet more simple. Such would seem to me to be a major step forward and enable much greateer optimization, utilization, maintainability, etc.
I would travel that fast too, or faster, on that road. That says nothing whatsoever about whether they were traveling that fast at that time or whether they slowed, as was apparently claimed. Perhaps they would like to cite what the average speed of other non-US vehicles at the same observed points was. It is easy to make data say whatever you like, as that would start to be more-relevant, but still far from really establishing any fact. Oh I forgot, the data is classified, so they can make it say whatever they like with no review, as the US has done repeatedly in Iraq.
It can't be long now that we noticed the lens of the Vorgon sighting device. Are you sure those are galaxies on the other side, and not the twinkling of a charging energy device of a demolition crew?
If you include ignoring the standard definition and doing whatever you please, yes, they read it. By that definition, my toaster reads it, too.
Do you really think they wanted to control the browser market for any purpose than to destroy it, because it was free and open?
Unfortunately for them, even after abandoning their users and code base for several years after they thought their opposition was dead, they find they have to come back to it once in a while.
If they would implement and support W3C and other standards, as well as reputable browser vendors do, it would be a start.
Sure, what could be wrong with that?
Name a good software company that has had a serious relationship with Microsoft as a competitor and has come off better over a 5-year period as a result of trying to cooperate with them (OK, IBM lasted a bit longer, but most are dead).
IBM has demonstrated any number of ways of showing some level of cooperation with the open or free software communities. Apple, too, has earned some good karma, basing their OS and browser on open code and architecture, even if they keep a lot proprietary. Sun has been involved as well, and it hasn't kept them from keeping other things private. So why can't Microsoft think of something like most other major companies have, without calling a conference of competitors that sounds too much like looking for a target to attack, much like SCO's supposed invitation to IBM and the open source community to sit down and work things out?
Stop being so evil. Microsoft has enough money in the bank to be able to afford business ethics and earn trust.
The reason I (and many others, I'm sure) switched from Alta Vista to Google was that Google consistently returned the results I wanted when given a simple query. AV would generally require me to build a relatively complicated expression (often in several iterations) to get good results. Google just needed a word or two. Google's idea of using links to rate page's value ("PageRank") was a brilliant innovation.
I use Google today as much as the next person for simple queries where I want to be advertised to or there is one quite-public company to be found
The statement "and many others, I'm sure" is vague enough to fit almost any possible set of circumstances, even if it were only a fraction of a percent of those who switched and never go back. It may have been the reason for many who never figured out the value of an accurate powerful search capability. But it completely neglects another reason for those who did value the capabilities:
Altavista discontinued almost every capability that made them such a good search engine, and it has been many years since I could recommend them on any basis to anyone except just as an alternative that will give a different set of results. It seems that Google is perhaps: not willing, not able, or not aware of the value of a better search capability for power users. Are they afraid their advertisers won't rise to the top? Is there any other alternative I missed? None of them are things I would like to believe about Google which has many positives as a company, but where's the state-of-the-art technology when we need something besides a website popularity contest?
Perhaps I sound trollish, because I have taken the time to describe things politely and repeatedly in great depth for Google for many years and have never even receive an acknowledgement that there is anyone who thinks this sort of thing would be valuable. This feels like an attitude of "We're Google and you are not", rather than of community -- the same silent treatment I got from AltaVista as they made themselves less and less valuable and I let them know about it, asking for them to restore features. Thus, Google deserves to lose market share, as Altavista did, to anyone who does something better for a significant portion of users who are not being well-served now, in which I include myself. There is so much more that could be done.
I have no real desire for Microsoft to succeed in this area because I do not trust them with the power they have now. If they serve to jog Google into action that benefits me with the basic ability to search the internet better, then they served a useful function. If they are trying hardest just to be another Google, then ultimately it probably doesn't matter too much which one is declared winner.
Altavista may have had some nice functions, but Google returns much more useful results. There is a reason pretty much everyone stopped using Altavista you know. For you, perhaps. Especially for those without a clue how to really search, so the best they can hope for is the most-popular thing that the most other sites are linking to.
But then please don't go complaining about spam when you are not willing to use or have available a more-intelligent search capability to find exactly what you are after.
What you wind up with is only good for advertisers and manipulators.
It seems to be trendy on /. to bash Google these days if there were any real criticism, maybe they would be motivated. What I see is a community that believes they can do no wrong and Oohs and Ahhs about non-innovations like web-based email and public text projects subverted to their commercial purposes. How about improving search?
people switched because it was the best overall. That seems to have forced Yahoo to improve as well.
Your world must be extremely one-dimensional to believe, in Panglossian fashion, that "best overall" is even a definable metric, or that it will naturally arise from the marketplace.
We are far better served by numerous independent innovators which we had at least to some degree until AltaVista was repeatedly sold and repeatedly downgraded their capabilities. If the best business business model is for them to show you what they and their advertisers want you to see, combined with the 1% most-popular that rises to the top by counting links, how is that better in any sense? Intelligent people are usually looking for needles in haystacks, not for the dross that rises to the top or could have been found by guessing domain names.
Even now, AltaVista frequently will give me much that I cannot get from Google, and I would even call "dogpile.com" a much greater and more-useful innovation than Google ever offered (beyond their first idea that searching was a popularity contest, which is sometimes true for the masses), drawing and combining results from different search engines to avoid the single Google slant.
I would start using it, if it offered better searches for the person who didn't just want to know who got linked to the most from outside. Where is the indication of what they think is "at least as good"? Two very different approaches, instead of two that can be spammed using the same technique, would be refreshing. FWIW, the "near me" button is nothing like the "near" capabiliity allowing the nearness of one keyword to another to be specified for a match (Altavista seems to have lost this and many other capabilities once Yahoo bought them out).
And they probably had far better OS utilization of the 64 bit architecture with their VMS or Unix. So what.
They also had much better capability and accuracy, allowing you to search for exactly what you wanted, not just what was most popular, allowing things like the near keyword, partial word wildcarding, and many more.
Why don't we ever hear of better search capabilities, instead of nearly-meaningless hardware shifts. The market has stagnated under Google who can't figure out how to offer even as good a search as their competitors offered at the time they launched.
Tell me something useful.
Quite a hefty price for a laptop without a wireless card. Putting good wireless service into a Linux laptop would be a bigger step forward.
The thing posing the greatest risk are the sorts of things which have already brought two shuttles, or the astronaughts have been quite unnaturally lucky in the many flights.
It has been some years ago, but I saw both WordPerfect and Corel Draw running well on NT on Alpha at CeBit in Hanover. So what?
NT was a 32-bit operation, even on Alpha. VMS and Unix, on the other hand, supported real 64-bit applications, memory management, etc. at the time. Then and now, I couldn't care less about Windows running on the hardware because there was no discernable difference in the products for all the effort (at the time I still occasionally ran Windows so I might have cared, which I do not today).
Selling 64 bits was/is like selling the hydrogen car. It is of significant value, but getting the masses to move requires considerable compatibility with the existing infrastructure, and most will judge it on criteria of not what it could be but how well it runs their existing apps.
If you have never used anything but IE before, I can imagine you somehow feeling that IE served users' needs.
A short list that is more than a year old is found here.
Anyone with a lot of knowledge of both products or the products of other browser makers could come up with many more significant differences. It is horrible to have a Windows user telling of all his problems pleading you to come help and then you are forced to stumble through the web with IE for him because he is too short-sighted to use anything else. That is why he is on Windows with all the problems in the first place, because he was incapable of good analysis.
If IE had never existed, the World Wide Web experience of the user would be just as universal and far richer. If Netscape or others had never existed, it would be far poorer. That is the bottom line, however you want to define the success or failure of technology that has nothing to do with solid technology. What did Microsoft contribute... Active X? There is a real winner. Broken/incompetent standards support to make pages only work in IE if written by IE users? Security holes galore, generally not present in the other browsers? A monoculture (even if the technology had been good, this is a bad thing). Declaring IE a technological success is a statement about you. At Microsoft, the only real success is something that can be abused to dominate, and a rusty, infected blade seems to be of more use to them in surgury to threaten the patient than a good one, so define success in their terms if you like.
From a technological standpoint, IE is quite bad. But from a business perspective, it could be Hello World, and it would be successful, as the years of Microsoft dominance with very bad products shows.
Or is Chinese communism an unqualified success because it serves so many people.
Usually a plan and design shows how to get to the first basic requirements while having a model that can support most directions the person is willing to go. It is the fundamental/abstract model that has to be carefully established, not the details of every part of the implementation.
Burning $15 million says nothing about why the plan failed or if it failed.
Unfortunately, better technology often has little to do with business success, but I find it not a compelling argument for the crap we see many companies put out that does not meet basic reasonable requirements.
If success is defined by your bottom line, go join Microsoft who can put anyone out of business and steal their designs without expending any effort or advancing the industry or market.
By your criteria, Internet Explorer in any version more-widely-deployed than non-IE browsers is the better browser. I disagree. I do not consider Microsoft a success, because they do little or nothing to advance the art, and destroy it in many ways. Or we should all give up programming and become IP sharks and unethical bullies. I have no use for their work, and they are extremely antisocial, however profitable they are.
On the other hand, years of thought and discussion don't help at all without a certain amount of experience trying to implement the project.
Certainly without experience at all, it is hopeless so if you employ people with no practical experience in the domain, I guess producing something worthless is no worse than what they did at the University. Of course, without planning and design, the experience is often completely wasted, and I watch companies go into cycle after cycle making exactly the same mistakes because without careful analysis, creating a model, etc. they learned nothing, and they blame everyone but themselves because they didn't write any incriminating principles to follow in the first place.
You don't find out until you try to write the code what exactly the issues that you're trying to plan to avoid are.
Perhaps you should speak for yourself. I can imagine that some people are poor at avoiding problems by thinking ahead, but I have great success that way. A well understood abstract model is far less error-prone than spaghetti code with no forethought or put together by team members each pursuing a different vision. If evolution were the best way to design things, perhaps we should just wait for evolution to do it, but I prefer to use my brain to model in advance, which is the one thing the brain does well -- otherwise we might as well just be single-celled organisms.
If you try to plan before coding at all, you come up with something like EJB, which very elegantly solves problems which don't exist, and doesn't work for reasons that don't impact theory.
This arises from diving into a project without understanding requirements, not from studying ways of fulfilling requirements. Your extreme position that any planning before coding is wasted effort is not supported by any experience I have ever had on any project.
The most reliable approach, in my opinion, is to start coding without any planning at all. It won't work, but when you then go into the planning phase, you'll have some clue as to what the pitfalls are that you have to avoid (as well as what things turn out not to be a problem). Then you can write a version that actually works somewhat. There will be new problems and things you didn't get to trying in the first failed attempt, so you'll need a redesign. After a few iterations, you'll have something that's simple and solid.
That is the Extreme Programming myth that things will just fall together that way, and if you are lucky with a good programmer or small team and simple project, it may.
Unfortunately, reality seldom works out that way in my experience. You get something that seems to work without realizing the basic inconsistencies in the self-competing fragmented model. Management refuses to throw away the code since it superficially seems to work (superficial design, superficial results). And you go into a mode where you are spending all your time trying to make up for things that the model does not provide, which will never get near the consistency of a simple original design, so the model just gets worse as you go on.
My personal bias is that you should assume that your project is going to fail and have a lot of scavengable parts, such that your future projects will have a high chance of success (or, at least, start out further ahead).
If you are employing people with no domain expertise or process to obtain such, perhaps, but coding is not necessarily the best way to foster domain expertise, even if it is the only successful method you have ever pursued.
I have lots of evidence of failed projects due to failure to plan.
It can take months or years of thought and discussion to reasonably avoid extreme catastrophies.
While it is silly to try to plan every detail and anyone who claims to do so is lying, a simple elegant, successful general approach is seldom the first one to pop into the head. It takes a lot of thought. Of course, for those incapable of such forethought, why not fail earlier rather than later.
Often the GPL is used as "Version 2 or any later version." Many people have their important projects under that sort of license. It takes a minor change for next versions of the GPL to require that GPL software only be used in conjunction with other GPL software, which is what Stallman invisions with the HURD. It's another small change to require that all subsequent versions of the program fall under the GPL, which would also work well for Stallman...
In order for that to EVER take effect, the software authors would have to remove the clause that allows usage under GPL version 2.
Part of the GPL's power comes from the fact that if you license your software under the GPL, you are assigning copyright to the FSF so that they can defend it with their money/lawyers.
Try reading the GPL rather than making such wild unfounded statements. Nowhere does it assign copyright to FSF.
While the types of things you suggest can occur without the GPL, they cannot with the GPL version 2 or anything now distributed under that license.
They can fork at any time such a hypothetical oppressive move were made. But you seem to ignore that possibility entirely saying they would have to roll their own.
There are enough people that believe that the license IS important that this will not happen.
Funny how people try to spin so many conspiracy theories around RMS while ignoring the real conspiracies everywhere else. Read the GPL a bit more carefully to understand what it does.
I do not deny big RMS and FSF contributions to GCC, glibc, and of course the GPL. Yes, they get (part of) the ball rolling. But this does not justify their requests to use the term "GNU/Linux". DEC's (and X Consortium) contribution was of the same magnitude, because without the good graphical interface Linux (and any of *BSDs) would be nowhere near the current state. Yet they do not demand the term "xc/Linux" should be used.
But I would still be happily using the free software I have, and who knows what technical advancements would have replaced them. I used and valued DEC software long before there was a GUI, and the GUI isn't the indispensible piece for me that you seem to think it is, even assuming nothing else would have taken it's place. Believe me, DEC's GUIs were never worth writing home about. I do not run a GUI on my most important systems today, which is freedom that free software gives me with no contribution from DEC. DEC wrote all kinds of wonderful compilers as well as operating systems but were never philanthropic enough to allow me to use them freely. The UI was not much of an intentional contribution which you would understand if you ever licensed software from them, including their DEC adaptations of the UI.
DEC's contribution was at most a technical contribution to a narrow part of the system. I do not find this comparable to the FSF contribution.
Linus already gets all the credit, some of which he deserves for the kernel. Alan Cox contributes under his Linux kernel banner. Linus does not seem to value freedom and GPL (based upon past actions) to the extent it is merited. And what does the Apache Foundation have to do at all with Linux distributions or free software?
While the Linux kernel may be substitutable, I have never found the GPL, GNU utilities and other things as substitutable.
Linus seems to believe that the technology is more important than the freedom (as he has clearly expressed WRT bitkeeper and on many other occasions), which is part of why they tend to undervalue the GNU contribution. I suspect Linus is coming to value it a bit more with the SCO nonsense.
That is why I respect the idea that being forced to use non-free software where reasonable alternatives exist could easily be reason enough to change jobs.
How on earth could a credible threat be made against a free software developer? Details, please. If he was receiving benefits or consideration from the FSF or the FSF was offering something, then it is appropriate that FSF has some say in what he does. Otherwise, as I told Darl McBride to his face, what part of the GPL don't you get? How does it make it possible to threaten someone and force them to work in a direction they do not believe to be of value?
Freedom is the most important aspect of these projects. While good things should follow, having the freedom to fork, as GCC and glibc and others have done when the originators stagnated is what I would interpret as RMS/FSF's most important contribution.
If they recognize the changes as good and accept them back into their code base, that is their right, and that is how free software projects work.
Richard Stallman never said he personally wrote the code all by himself, any more than the creators of a Redhat, Mandrake, Debian distribution who slap their names on the collection do, even though the RMS/FSF contribution to the code and project that created them was in my view clearly superior to that of Redhat, for example, even if I think his personal judgement on EMacs UI and many other things does not produce a product I want to use. The key is I can fix it or choose to substitute something else.
His desire to attach the GNU name is, again, the desire to teach about the free software nature of some basic building blocks there, which he consideres the most significant aspect of the software. What other name would convey the spirit of freedom like GNU? Others contributions, while valuable, are technical except for their choice to follow the GNU lead and code under the banner and license of free software.
It does work, exactly in the way the legislators ultimately mean for it to work, destroying competition. Please elaborate how you think it could be revised to increase rather than destroy competition.
Pay a premium to have a medium that is slightly freer, yet the medium itself is just as controlled and subvertible.
Should be more popular than flight insurance since it is more-likely to kill you. I insure you for a modest fee against a civilization-ending event, (assuming there are survivors and insurers surviving to work out the details of collection -- but then if there were survivors it wasn't civilization-ending, now was it).