Actually, if you set-up a Linux workstation/firewall running mlDonkey, you can use the web interface to search and initiate the download. Find your ISO's, MP3's, almost anything. It lets you connect to a variety of P2P protocols too.
Wait a minute. Isn't that one of the big things about Open source development? A huge swath of developers looking over your code, making improvements, and submitting them back to the maintainer for inclusion?
I mean granted, the MS license isn't GPL or anything. About the only superficial difference I see is that MS requires a royalty for every copy of your modified source code, and there is no provision to ensure the end-user gets a copy of the source as well.
On the surface, it doesn't look like that bad of a plan. But it also depends on who is qualified to get access to the WinCE source.
On a side note, is there any reference about being sued to death for using part of the MS Windows source? (ie: could the Wine & Samba developers get access to the source to look at it?)
The idea is it's easier (and cheaper) for IBM to spend the $20 Million or so to buy SCO, than spend time litigating, or possibly losing a $1 billion lawsuit.
The alternative thought is to have Microsoft buy SCO, and keep on sticking IBM & Linux with the pointy lawsuit stick, adding to FUD and distracting IBM from Linux.
This could certainly be a tactic. Everyone knows their product sucks, they have no product or market share, and it just comes down to cashing out. The question may be who will buy them and for what purpose?
I think the only way that the online presences will last is:
1) Better selection. If they have a better selection online, than at the brick-and-mortar store, then definitely have to go online to get what I want. And I've seen plenty of times where a Widget is only Red locally, but is Red, White & Blue online.
2) Offer a lower price or Free shipping. In theory, the online stores should have lower overhead. They don't have to have shop-keepers and what not. It's all in a warehouse.
So I think that online businesses do have a shot to keep the online stores active or even more viable. It's up to them to streamline and offer the consumer a reason to shop online.
About the only thing I came away with is, if you do it the way a specific vendor wants, it kicks the crap outa the other one, otherwise the ATI may be a wee bit faster.
Close. I think the big thing he was trying to say was that ATI & NVidia in the ARB2 mode, ATI kicks the snot out of NVidia. But it's because ATI renders with less precision than NVidia.
So when both cards are in ARB2 mode, NVidia looks better, but ATI is faster.
Wonder if it's anything like microwaving a CD-R. Pop that sucker in for 5 seconds, and you see lightning dancing across the surface of the disc.
On a side note, it's much more impressive to nuke them one at a time, rather than a bunch of them.
One place I worked at went through CD-R's like candy. We had a whole, 50 disc spindle of bad discs, and nuked it. Wasn't that impressive to watch, until it started smelling like Ozone in the break room.
This is pure speculation on my part. But considering MS's stance on Linux, and supporting non-MS operating systems, would they kill cross-platform support?
I don't know how many customers Rational has that are using the Windows version of their SW (eg: ClearCase & ClearQuest), versus the Linux & Unix versions. Is there enough income coming in to encourage MS to support other platforms?
And as far as Borland is concerned, I would expect the Kylix to get knifed quickly since it's prob not a significant source of revenue.
I could see how IBM buying Rational would be good for Linux & the community. But MS buying Rational seems like a way for MS to kill off a bunch of viable products on non-MS platforms.
The big difference is that VMWare & Win4Lin emulate the entire machine, and hence need a larger server.
The CodeWeavers solution looks like it simply runs the Windows executable, and can keep the resource usage much smaller. This in turn allows many more applications to run on a standard server.
Most of "dark fiber" articles out there fail to see the same rationale behind the large amount of dark fiber out there. This is proper planning. Network traffic has been doubling every two years or so, this means that 90-95% dark fiber would last you about 6-8 years.
Not sure about the network traffic doubling every two years. I seem to recall that it's a mythical number that MCI came up with at the beginning of the Internet age.
But other reports I've found indicate that network utilization is doubling every 3-6 months. Yikes. Don't know if that means that the dark fiber can now only last another 2 years assuming it gets turned on or not...
This is perfectly sensible. In fact, if we had to rebury fiber within 6 years of paying billions to rip open downtown Manhattan I would fire my provisioning manager.
I think that you assume one thing, and that's fiber technology does not improve. Assuming that the technology doesn't change, and network traffic is doubling every 2 years, then the capacity will only last 6-10 years or so. But if the transmission equipment gets faster and allows greater capacity through the current fiber, then the life will be much longer.
Assuming new systems utilizing 64-channel dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) as announced on Lucent, then this potentially allows 2.56 Tb/s per fiber. Doubling the channels to say 128, now means double the capacity, while using the same fiber.
As long as fiber technology keeps improving, then there shouldn't be a problem with running out of bandwidth, since the fiber is virtually upgradeable forever.
Re:Local and state governments
on
Largo Loving Linux
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
the states should have considered open source systems highly 2-3 years ago when they were over inflating their own budgets and spending along with the economies (some were still putting a few dimes away for their rainy day fund which has all been used up by now). open source benefits begin with the initial systems planing and development phase. it would be really hard to justify spending money on migrating systems for future preceived savings.
Don't forget though, every IT department is not in between their upgrade cycles. Some may be (and really should be) planning IT improvements once the economy improves, and tax revenues are flowing again.
Just because you don't have money today, doesn't mean you shouldn't make plans for when you do have money again.
Re:Most important quote...
on
Largo Loving Linux
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Having said that, the 1.3% vs. 3% IT budget cost reduction is not all because of linux. All of that dirt cheap hardward adds up. I'm sure their bottom sure would still be significantly less than 3% even if they did use windows. Spending a couple dollars on a dumb terminal equals hugh hardware savings.
I think one important facet is could they run Windows on the same kind of hardware as the equipment they are buying as Linux terminals? Granted, the HW is dirt cheap, but also consider that Windows XP needs to run on a 1Gh+ machine with 128Mb of memory. Suddenly cheap hardware doesn't make sense in a Windows installation.
The big advantage is that old and underpowered systems can be recycled and still used. So Largo sees a cost savings in both SW licensing, and HW costs. But the costs are intertwined. Buying a Windows license also means buying more expensive HW to run it on.
You briefly touched on this in your post, but what is the comfort level of the vendors you have found? What are the chances of them falling by the wayside, and being unable or unwilling to provide you with the support you may need. Are they large, and well-established companies, or are they smaller shops that may disappear if times remain tough?
Have you also factored in support contracts, and that products purchased, may be EOL'd, and force upgrades to continue being supported. These forced upgrades could then have a trickle-down effect of increased license costs, licensing changes, and increased hardware costs (new servers).
Not to sound to OSS Zealot-like, but by having the source code, you own it for the life of your project. With a third-party vendor, you are ate the mercy of the vendor's support staff, and development.
I'd say take a closer look on support costs, licensing upgrades, and the products being EOL'd and forcing upgrades.
Along with GCC for cross-platform compatibility, look at using GLIBC to make sure the functions you expect to be there, are there for all of the platforms.
Haven't checked recently, but is CygWin still being maintained? If it is, then you have GCC available on all four of your platforms, along with the same development libraries and headers.
You may lose some of your "Big Iron" support since you are using GLIBC instead of the native libraries. (but I'm not an expert in this to know what kind of performance hit you may take).
My greatest concern in the release of privately developed extensions and fixes, is that these extensions then become proprietary due to extend & embrace.
If Public funds are used to not only write the code, but to develop the underlying protocols, methodologies and what not, then this whole collection should be made available. By placing the code under LGPL, the code then can be given life, and the assurance that code fixes can be migrated back to the public good. With a BSD license, a fix can be made, but there is no requirement to publish it back to the public.
If a private company takes assets funded by the public good, they should not be allowed to corrupt them.
Of course if a company really wanted to extend the public library, they could write a wrapper library around the code. The intention is to prevent code written by public monies to be hijacked by a private corporation. BSD allows this hijacking. LGPL does not.
If a company wants to make a new function or extend the library, then fine. They can link against the publicy developed library, and make it a requirement for the final delivery. But they should not be permitted to arbitrarily extend it, without propogating those extensions to the public.
...that the GPL is restrictive. It does make it considerably more difficult for a company to profit from code released as GPL.
However, I definitely think that the code should be public source. But what's wrong with using the LGPL?
Work funded with public monies should be available for all to use. Ideally, all work should be done in the fashion of libraries, rather than a standalone application. This screams for the LGPL to be used.
If work is done under the LGPL, then the libraries can be made public, while companies can make proprietary front-ends that utilize the public libraries. Should bug-fixes, or extensions be made to the library, then the library (and the entire community) benefit.
My main beef with the BSD license, is that once the general library is released to the public, a private company can take the library, and bastardize it however they want (ie: Microsoft & Kerberos). By using the LGPL, the changes must be returned to the public, thus ensuring the public trust.
I don't want AMD to go out of business. But if they do, I hope Intel has the decency to buy the technology and use it, rather than let it completely die off.
To further expand upon this, if you do not see Silicon Valley as being the center, what geographic areas do you foresee being new centers of excellence.
Additionally, what do you see companies looking for in non-Silicon Valley areas? Low taxes, low costs for manpower, low utilities, access to bandwidth?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you set-up a Linux workstation/firewall running mlDonkey, you can use the web interface to search and initiate the download. Find your ISO's, MP3's, almost anything. It lets you connect to a variety of P2P protocols too.
Mod The Parent up. Good & Fast mirror to the Flash
Wait a minute. Isn't that one of the big things about Open source development? A huge swath of developers looking over your code, making improvements, and submitting them back to the maintainer for inclusion?
I mean granted, the MS license isn't GPL or anything. About the only superficial difference I see is that MS requires a royalty for every copy of your modified source code, and there is no provision to ensure the end-user gets a copy of the source as well.
On the surface, it doesn't look like that bad of a plan. But it also depends on who is qualified to get access to the WinCE source.
On a side note, is there any reference about being sued to death for using part of the MS Windows source? (ie: could the Wine & Samba developers get access to the source to look at it?)
The idea is it's easier (and cheaper) for IBM to spend the $20 Million or so to buy SCO, than spend time litigating, or possibly losing a $1 billion lawsuit.
The alternative thought is to have Microsoft buy SCO, and keep on sticking IBM & Linux with the pointy lawsuit stick, adding to FUD and distracting IBM from Linux.
This could certainly be a tactic. Everyone knows their product sucks, they have no product or market share, and it just comes down to cashing out. The question may be who will buy them and for what purpose?
My one argument against that is there was a total of $161,909 (or 1.90% of gross) available to compensate the artists.
Using the same logic, only ~2% of the sales of your software is used to compensate the programmers, managers, leads, etc. working on your software.
For some reason, I don't think even Microsoft pockets 98% of the gross sales of their software.
It's not like other Software Vendors market the same way...
I think the only way that the online presences will last is:
1) Better selection. If they have a better selection online, than at the brick-and-mortar store, then definitely have to go online to get what I want. And I've seen plenty of times where a Widget is only Red locally, but is Red, White & Blue online.
2) Offer a lower price or Free shipping. In theory, the online stores should have lower overhead. They don't have to have shop-keepers and what not. It's all in a warehouse.
So I think that online businesses do have a shot to keep the online stores active or even more viable. It's up to them to streamline and offer the consumer a reason to shop online.
About the only thing I came away with is, if you do it the way a specific vendor wants, it kicks the crap outa the other one, otherwise the ATI may be a wee bit faster.
Close. I think the big thing he was trying to say was that ATI & NVidia in the ARB2 mode, ATI kicks the snot out of NVidia. But it's because ATI renders with less precision than NVidia.
So when both cards are in ARB2 mode, NVidia looks better, but ATI is faster.
So why is Microsoft entering the argument? Are they getting into Broadband now?
Wonder if it's anything like microwaving a CD-R. Pop that sucker in for 5 seconds, and you see lightning dancing across the surface of the disc.
On a side note, it's much more impressive to nuke them one at a time, rather than a bunch of them.
One place I worked at went through CD-R's like candy. We had a whole, 50 disc spindle of bad discs, and nuked it. Wasn't that impressive to watch, until it started smelling like Ozone in the break room.
SQL Server I believe is considered part of the Office suite (ala BackOffice). Not sure where Visual Studio falls in.
But the use of Visual Studio is an enabler to encourage further Windows growth and dependence.
This is pure speculation on my part. But considering MS's stance on Linux, and supporting non-MS operating systems, would they kill cross-platform support?
I don't know how many customers Rational has that are using the Windows version of their SW (eg: ClearCase & ClearQuest), versus the Linux & Unix versions. Is there enough income coming in to encourage MS to support other platforms?
And as far as Borland is concerned, I would expect the Kylix to get knifed quickly since it's prob not a significant source of revenue.
I could see how IBM buying Rational would be good for Linux & the community. But MS buying Rational seems like a way for MS to kill off a bunch of viable products on non-MS platforms.
Thoughts?
The big difference is that VMWare & Win4Lin emulate the entire machine, and hence need a larger server.
The CodeWeavers solution looks like it simply runs the Windows executable, and can keep the resource usage much smaller. This in turn allows many more applications to run on a standard server.
The original speculated myth
Retorts and support for doubling every year.
Most of "dark fiber" articles out there fail to see the same rationale behind the large amount of dark fiber out there. This is proper planning. Network traffic has been doubling every two years or so, this means that 90-95% dark fiber would last you about 6-8 years.
Not sure about the network traffic doubling every two years. I seem to recall that it's a mythical number that MCI came up with at the beginning of the Internet age.
But other reports I've found indicate that network utilization is doubling every 3-6 months. Yikes. Don't know if that means that the dark fiber can now only last another 2 years assuming it gets turned on or not...
This is perfectly sensible. In fact, if we had to rebury fiber within 6 years of paying billions to rip open downtown Manhattan I would fire my provisioning manager.
I think that you assume one thing, and that's fiber technology does not improve. Assuming that the technology doesn't change, and network traffic is doubling every 2 years, then the capacity will only last 6-10 years or so. But if the transmission equipment gets faster and allows greater capacity through the current fiber, then the life will be much longer.
Assuming new systems utilizing 64-channel dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) as announced on Lucent, then this potentially allows 2.56 Tb/s per fiber. Doubling the channels to say 128, now means double
the capacity, while using the same fiber.
As long as fiber technology keeps improving, then there shouldn't be a problem with running out of bandwidth, since the fiber is virtually upgradeable forever.
the states should have considered open source systems highly 2-3 years ago when they were over inflating their own budgets and spending along with the economies (some were still putting a few dimes away for their rainy day fund which has all been used up by now). open source benefits begin with the initial systems planing and development phase. it would be really hard to justify spending money on migrating systems for future preceived savings.
Don't forget though, every IT department is not in between their upgrade cycles. Some may be (and really should be) planning IT improvements once the economy improves, and tax revenues are flowing again.
Just because you don't have money today, doesn't mean you shouldn't make plans for when you do have money again.
Having said that, the 1.3% vs. 3% IT budget cost reduction is not all because of linux. All of that dirt cheap hardward adds up. I'm sure their bottom sure would still be significantly less than 3% even if they did use windows. Spending a couple dollars on a dumb terminal equals hugh hardware savings.
I think one important facet is could they run Windows on the same kind of hardware as the equipment they are buying as Linux terminals? Granted, the HW is dirt cheap, but also consider that Windows XP needs to run on a 1Gh+ machine with 128Mb of memory. Suddenly cheap hardware doesn't make sense in a Windows installation.
The big advantage is that old and underpowered systems can be recycled and still used. So Largo sees a cost savings in both SW licensing, and HW costs. But the costs are intertwined. Buying a Windows license also means buying more expensive HW to run it on.
Dude, between this and the Segway posting:
"...It's also the most overhyped and overpriced toy ever, and I'm kicking myself for posting it since that just contributes to the problem."
Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Or do you need your caffeine fix?
You briefly touched on this in your post, but what is the comfort level of the vendors you have found? What are the chances of them falling by the wayside, and being unable or unwilling to provide you with the support you may need. Are they large, and well-established companies, or are they smaller shops that may disappear if times remain tough?
Have you also factored in support contracts, and that products purchased, may be EOL'd, and force upgrades to continue being supported. These forced upgrades could then have a trickle-down effect of increased license costs, licensing changes, and increased hardware costs (new servers).
Not to sound to OSS Zealot-like, but by having the source code, you own it for the life of your project. With a third-party vendor, you are ate the mercy of the vendor's support staff, and development.
I'd say take a closer look on support costs, licensing upgrades, and the products being EOL'd and forcing upgrades.
Along with GCC for cross-platform compatibility, look at using GLIBC to make sure the functions you expect to be there, are there for all of the platforms.
Haven't checked recently, but is CygWin still being maintained? If it is, then you have GCC available on all four of your platforms, along with the same development libraries and headers.
You may lose some of your "Big Iron" support since you are using GLIBC instead of the native libraries. (but I'm not an expert in this to know what kind of performance hit you may take).
silliness as a belief in Santa Clause!
You mean believing in Santa Clause is Silly?
Next you'll tell me that believing in the Great Pumpkin, the Easter Bunny, and meeting my projects deadline is silly...
My greatest concern in the release of privately developed extensions and fixes, is that these extensions then become proprietary due to extend & embrace.
If Public funds are used to not only write the code, but to develop the underlying protocols, methodologies and what not, then this whole collection should be made available. By placing the code under LGPL, the code then can be given life, and the assurance that code fixes can be migrated back to the public good. With a BSD license, a fix can be made, but there is no requirement to publish it back to the public.
If a private company takes assets funded by the public good, they should not be allowed to corrupt them.
Of course if a company really wanted to extend the public library, they could write a wrapper library around the code. The intention is to prevent code written by public monies to be hijacked by a private corporation. BSD allows this hijacking. LGPL does not.
If a company wants to make a new function or extend the library, then fine. They can link against the publicy developed library, and make it a requirement for the final delivery. But they should not be permitted to arbitrarily extend it, without propogating those extensions to the public.
...that the GPL is restrictive. It does make it considerably more difficult for a company to profit from code released as GPL.
However, I definitely think that the code should be public source. But what's wrong with using the LGPL?
Work funded with public monies should be available for all to use. Ideally, all work should be done in the fashion of libraries, rather than a standalone application. This screams for the LGPL to be used.
If work is done under the LGPL, then the libraries can be made public, while companies can make proprietary front-ends that utilize the public libraries. Should bug-fixes, or extensions be made to the library, then the library (and the entire community) benefit.
My main beef with the BSD license, is that once the general library is released to the public, a private company can take the library, and bastardize it however they want (ie: Microsoft & Kerberos). By using the LGPL, the changes must be returned to the public, thus ensuring the public trust.
I don't want AMD to go out of business. But if they do, I hope Intel has the decency to buy the technology and use it, rather than let it completely die off.
To further expand upon this, if you do not see Silicon Valley as being the center, what geographic areas do you foresee being new centers of excellence.
Additionally, what do you see companies looking for in non-Silicon Valley areas? Low taxes, low costs for manpower, low utilities, access to bandwidth?