Back around when 2.4 was released I wrote two articles about how to help test the kernel.
You can help the kernel developers immensely by testing your kernel methodically and thoroughly rather than just casually trying it out.
It's also important for you to test new kernels, even stable kernels, before putting them to use on a production machine. Even if they work well for everybody else, you may be blessed to discover your very own bug.
Also realize that because Linus can issue a new kernel anytime he feels like it, there is no particular requirement that a kenel be tested before its released. It's happened a number of times that "stable" kernels have been released that have turned out to be quite broken, especially on non-x86 architectures.
The OSDL kindly prepared Japanese translations but for some reason have taken them offline. I have copies though and will try to post them sometime soon.
There are
other articles on web application quality and C++ programming, with more to come. So far they are all under the GNU Free Documentation License.
I am actively seeking more translations if you want to help out.
If you prefer to curl up with a dead tree by the fire, read moderator Peter Neumann's
Computer Related Risks. It is also available in Japanese translation.
Now, few of us are likely to ever risk our lives flying in space shuttles. Maybe some of us might write the code or design the machinery the astronauts will trust with their lives. But all of us depend on computers every day for our livelihood, and many of us depend on them for our lives more than you would feel comfortable with if you understand the implications of it.
Fly on an airplane lately? Anything a little more modern than a DC-3? Do you know what fly by wire means? Ever write code with a stack overflow or heap corruption? What do you suppose that means for the embedded systems that run today's commercial aircraft?
Does your car have antilock brakes?
Read RISKS. It will make you a better programmer. Because it will put the fear of God into you.
While it focusses on reforming copyright laws, most of what I say applies to patents. Note that in the U.S. at least, patents have the same legal foundation as copyrights, being authorized by the same clause in the Constitution.
The steps I suggest are:
Speak Out
Vote
Write to Your Elected Representatives
Donate Money to Political Campaigns
Support Campaign Finance Reform
Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Practice Civil Disobedience
Well I don't think the EFF deals with patents but they do a lot of other good work.
The above article is going to be put under a Creative Commons license to encourage copying as soon as I have the final draft done. I expect that to happen this weekend. So check back and copy the article to other websites when it's ready.
While I don't get a huge amount of traffic to my homepage, I also don't expect most of the people visiting it to already be free software enthusiasts who know all about the patent controversy.
The copy on my own website has been served to about 5000 distinct hosts so far this month. A google search for
"Let's Put SCO Behind Bars" turns up 2190 matches.
Most of those are links. The article has a Creative Commons license, and I've been encouraging copying. By doing various searches, and checking my logs for referring pages, I've found a few dozen other copies on the web, many of them on message boards where they've had lots of readers.
It turned out to be very helpful when
Linux Universe asked me to submit my article there. They use UBB codes instead of HTML. I realized that lots of other message boards use UBB, so I saved a copy on my site in
UBB format for people to copy to other message boards.
I've been meaning to write a plain-ascii version suitable for email and usenet but haven't gotten to it yet.
Both Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond enjoyed the article. Stallman said that if it weren't against his ethics to write proprietary code, he would have enjoyed working at the SCO of old as I described it.
My first draft I posted at Advogato, followed soon after by InfoAnarchy and then Kuro5hin.
However, I didn't succeed in getting Slashdot to feature it. One can only dream.
I have been hesitant to allow copying of many of my articles before now, but when one's objective is to get a lot of people to read what one has written, and to do so in a short time, it works wonders.
... even if I do say so myself. I'm not well-known enough to get the press that Eric Raymond does, but my article is quite popular, with 5000 pages views on my copy so far. The article has a Creative Commons license, and there are dozens of copies around the web by now, so I would expect ten times as many people have read one of the copies.
I wrote a letter to the U.S. patent office back in 1994 that raised an objection to software patents that I had not heard before, nor have I heard it since.
My objection is that it's not always possible to tell where one invention that's used in a program leaves off, and where another begins. Because it's often possible to re-order the lines of code in a program without altering its behaviour, it could easily happen that someone else's patented algorithm is mixed in to your program in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to find.
I have replaced my homepage at
http://www.goingware.com/
with a protest page. So far this month my homepage has been getting about a hundred hits a day.
It was a rather hurried job. I could use some suggestions on how to explain why software patents are bad, but written so concisely that one can read and understand the argument in the twenty seconds I wait before redirecting to the FFII site.
You may be interested to read my piece
Change the Law. While it discusses what you can do about copyright law, patents in the U.S. are provided for by the same clause in the Constitution as copyrights, and what I suggest one can do to change the law is pretty much the same in any democratic country.
My understanding is that whatever kangaroo court hears domain dispute consistently sides with trademark holders. So I bet DirectTV's first step will be to take the DirecTVDefense.org domain away from the EFF.
A friend of mine has operated a website called
www.afm.com for quite some time. "AFM" stands for American Flea Market. A little while ago the
American Film Marketing Assocation disputed the domain, saying that he was cybersquatting on their trademark. Their complaint filled a four-inch binder. He's operated the domain for several years before hearing from these jokers.
They accused any of everything from kidnapping the Lindbergh baby to crashing those planes into the World Trade Center. Oh, yeah, and Andy had weapons of mass destruction.
My friend is no fool. He fought the dispute tooth and nail, without any legal representation - and won, he got to keep his domain. But not everyone has been so lucky.
Andy put up a site about it called
www.ShameOnTheAFMA.com,
which has some resources that others could use to defend their domains.
There is a legal term called "in loco parentis" which basically means that boarding schools have certain legal rights and obligations to act as parents to their students while they are away from home.
I don't really know, but I would imaging that this would cause the schools to be liable for their students' copyright infringement.
This wouldn't apply to Universities to the extent that their students are adults, but it is common for people to attend Universities as minors if they ever got put ahead during grade school.
While I don't suggest repealing copyright through a constitutional amendment, I do suggest amending the constitution in
Support Campaign Finance Reform:
Personally, I find it unfathomable that corporations are allowed to
make campaign donations at all. No one but an individual, natural person
ought to be allowed to do that.
The root of this problem lies in some established legal precedent
which makes a corporation the legal equivalent of a person, so that
corporations, and not just the people who work for or invest in them,
are now granted the same Constitutional rights as living human beings.
I think that the threat corporations pose to our fragile democracy could
be eliminated by adding an amendment something like the following to
our Constitution:
A corporation is not a person. No one but a natural person may donate
money to a political candidate, political party or elected official.
The solutions to many of the difficult problems our country faces
would be solved by eliminating the political influence of corporations.
If the power of corporations is allowed to continue to grow unchecked,
the threat to our nation will one day be as great as it was in the
days of the Civil War.
Quite a lot of positive benefits to society would follow from taking away the corporations' ability to influence politics, potentially many things far more significant than copyright reform. Consider how much better a world citizen the United States would be if the arms industry were no longer allowed to make campaign contributions, for example.
I think some of the musicians I link to at the end of the article accept donations, but I didn't think to note which ones.
However, many musicians who offer downloads also offer their CDs for sale from their website. Really the best way to support a musician whose music downloads you like is to buy a CD from them.
Keep in mind that independent musicians who pay to have their own CDs pressed get to keep most of the money when they sell a CD. Thus it is possible for them to make a decent living while selling only a modest number of CDs.
Musicians who are signed with major labels only get 42 cents when they sell a CD, and they also have to cover the costs of their advance, marketing and promotion from the initial sales of their album. Thus it may be a long time before such musicians get any money from their CD sales, and some never get any money at all.
Copyright is not a constitutional right like freedom of speech. While the constitution empowers congress to enact copyright laws, congress is not required to actually do so.
Copyright could be abolished tomorrow, in the US at least, if you could just get enough votes in congress to pass a bill to repeal copyright. That's not as difficult as it may sound, if you consider that more people share files with p2p apps in the US than voted for george bush.
SCO's executives may be personally guilty of violating securities law. I
understand its executives have engaged in questionable insider trading,
possibly to take advantage of the artificial inflation in SCO's stock price
resulting from its allegations. The quantities of stock being sold off by
SCO executives does not suggest they really believe they are about to win a
billion dollar lawsuit. For insiders to trade based on information that
is not available to the general public is an offense for which they may be
subjected to stern punishment by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The stock of companies offerring Linux products and services may have been
unfairly devalued as well. Stockholders in any of the affected companies -
either SCO or its competitors - may wish to avail themselves of the Security
and Exchange Commission's
Investor Complaint Form
to ask that something be done about this. You may not even be aware that
you have standing to complain: if you invest in any mutual funds that
hold shares in SCO, IBM, Red Hat or any other company that offers Linux
products or services, then you have a right to ask the SEC to investigate.
Check with your mutual fund to fund out which securities are in its
portfolio.
The article has a Creative Commons license. Please copy it to your own website, or to other message boards. Maybe someone who subscribes to a financial board could post it there. There is also a
UBB code version suitable for message boards that use that format.
While my piece
Change the Law focusses on reforming copyright law, the advice I give on how to accomplish it would apply to any laws that geeks want to have changed. Read the article to find more details on the steps I recommend:
The
ZooLib cross-platform application toolkit has been around for thirteen years, making it even more mature than wxWindows. Yet it is still in active development.
It's just not very well known yet because it's only been in open source since the fall of 2000. Prior to that it was a proprietary API for the use of Andy Green and his clients
Learning in Motion, who used it for such products as the client-server educational database
Knowledge Forum.
ZooLib is written in C++, and can produce native executables for Linux/X11, Windows, BeOS, and Mac OS (classic and carbon) with very little need for platform-specific client code.
It makes only very basic use of platform-specific code internally, which is kept encapsulated, so it wouldn't be very hard to port it to a completely new platform. Porting to a new Unix platform that uses X11 shouldn't be more than a day's work, for example. Porting to a platform that had a completely alien GUI API would be a few weeks of work for someone familiar with both the platform and ZooLib.
ZooLib's website has a piece I wrote about why cross-platform frameworks are good for developers:
I called just now. They said at first that they wanted my name and number so someone could call me back, and I gave it to them. Then they asked if I already had a license that I wanted to renew, so I said no.
I explained that I had several linux systems, and that I understood there were some intellectual property issues, so I wanted to be sure to be covered.
The helpful and polite lady on the phone told me that the license program had been "suspended until further notice". She said she was pretty sure it had to do with the lawsuit.
May you should call too (800 726 8649) just to be sure.
Please copy my article "Let's Put SCO Behind Bars" to your own website. I released it under a Creative Commons license. I designed the page to be very easy to copy, with only very simple, valid markup, and no external dependencies like images or stylesheets. It even looks good in lynx!
While the lawsuits being
defended by IBM and
filed by Red Hat are
likely to put an end to
The SCO Group's menace to the Free
Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out
of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this
way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I
feel we need to send a stronger message.
If we all work together, we can put
the executives
of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.
If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state
Attorney General.
If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law
enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for
criminal fraud and extortion.
Also from the article:
Stockholders in any of the affected companies -
either SCO or its competitors - may wish to avail themselves of the Security
and Exchange Commission's
Investor Complaint Form
to ask that something be done about this. You may not even be aware that
you have standing to complain: if you invest in any mutual funds that
hold shares in SCO, IBM, Red Hat or any other company that offers Linux
products or services, then you have a right to ask the SEC to investigate.
Check with your mutual fund to fund out which securities are in its
portfolio.
This page provides the article in the UBB code that some message boards use, with plain text coming soon. I'm also starting to post examples of letters that others have sent to their Attorney's General.
While I wasn't using Emacs, I was punching Hollerith cards in 1980, when I was 16.
And in 1976, I wrote my first program in FORTRAN on a coding form, then typed it into a teletype terminal on an IBM 360 mainframe at the
University of Idaho where my father was a E.E. grad student. I was twelve then.
I'm not sure most people understand that Windows is the most widely used host operating system for developing embedded code. I haven't read the article, but I imagine the study also discussed the issue of which workstation OS was best for writing your code on.
One reason nowadays that most embedded developers host their development on Windows is that most embedded tools publishers only make their tools available to run on Windows. Often these tools, like compilers for arcane chips, are quite specialized, so the developer is left with no choice.
That said, I think whoever wrote the report is on crack if they think Windows is a better development environment than Linux. I have been doing embedded for a year now, and one of the main things I still dislike about it is that I have to do most of my development on Windows.
It is quite common for each compiler vendor to write their own integrated development environment, with an editor and integrated build system. But the market for these products are not as great as the market for IDEs for the development of desktop or server software, which means they can't invest in developing a more refined GUI for their IDEs, so their basic usability and quality is quite poor.
If you think Visual Studio is a lousy environment for development, you should try the ARM IDE or TI's Code Composer Studio. Using them is like pounding nails with your fists.
However, the situation is slowly starting to look up. GCC targets many embedded CPUs and is starting to become widely used for embedded development. The other GNU tools also form a more or less complete set of what you would need to develop embedded products, with GDB acting as both a debugger and simulator, LD able to function as an embedded linker, being able to do two-machine debugging with GDB and so on. Also there's GNU make, CVS and so on.
The result is that while I had to use the proprietary (and expensive) ARM compiler to develop for the
Oxford Semiconductor ARM7TDMI-based 911 FireWire/IDE bridge chip (which allows you to hook up inexpensive IDE disk drives as firewire storage), they switched over to building their firmware with GCC for the 922 USB/FireWire/IDE 922 bridge chip.
I've been using GCC under Cygwin for my 922 development, but a CD with a new SDK on it is expected to arrive in the mail any day now. When it does, I will have a choice of Cygwin, Linux or Mac OS X development environments, all running the same version of GCC. And I'm very happy about that.
Most likely, though, I will use Mac OS X for my 922 development. I'd prefer using Linux to Windows, but if I can use Mac OS X, I'd prefer that to Linux, if for no other reason than the fact that
the clipboard works correctly, as well as that I could use CodeWarrior to edit my source.
Maybe if I get real ambitious, I might write a CodeWarrior plugin so I can use the CodeWarrior IDE to compile my code with arm-elf-gcc.
(And don't give me crap about not using Emacs. I was an expert at Emacs when most of you were still in diapers. I still have my.emacs file which I first created in 1987. But I vastly prefer CodeWarrior's GUI text editor unless I have some reason to run a bunch of Emacs lisp code on my source file.)
I like to write. It's what I do to relax when I'm not coding. But I take my writing pretty seriously. I write mostly either technical or opinion pieces. Here's links to most of them:
You should test your new kernel more thoroughly than by just casually trying it out on your machine. You can help the kernel developers significantly by doing so. You should also never deploy a new kernel on a production machine, even from a stable source version, unless you have rigorously tested it. While it may work great for everyone else, you may be personally blessed with the discovery of your very own bug, a bug which may cause data loss or significant downtime.
You should also be aware the Linus gets to release a new kernel whenever he wants. He does this when he thinks its the right time, for reasons that don't always involve reliability. He posts a new kernel release when he feels its ready, often without testing it particularly rigorously, and it has happened quite a few times that Linus has released a new "stable" kernel that turns out to be quite broken. It is actually quite common for the stable releases of the non-86 architectures to be quite buggy.
Finally, Linus announced on linux-kernel that the reason he released the first 2.4 stable kernel (2.4.0) was because he wanted more widespread testing, not because he felt it was ready to use. I wouldn't be surprised if he does this with 2.6. Both 2.2 and 2.4 went through several releases before they were really stabilized, and 2.4 has never been as reliable as the later 2.2 versions.
I am actively seeking further translations of these and
the other articles that are at
The Linux Quality Database. The articles are all under the GNU Free Documentation License so you can just grab them and translate away.
I do talk about their securities violations a little bit, more so in the current draft than the first few.
Every draft, though, has suggested that stockholders in any of the companies whose stock has been affected by SCO's shenanigans available themselves of the Securities and Exchange Commission's
Investor Complaint Form.
The page points out that if you're concerned about security as your complaint is transmitted over the Internet, you can fill in all the fields, print it from your browser, then fax or snail mail it in.
The form is pretty detailed, to make sure they receive all the information they need. That suggests to me that the SEC pays attention to these complaints.
Slashdot Mirror
You can help the kernel developers immensely by testing your kernel methodically and thoroughly rather than just casually trying it out.
It's also important for you to test new kernels, even stable kernels, before putting them to use on a production machine. Even if they work well for everybody else, you may be blessed to discover your very own bug.
Also realize that because Linus can issue a new kernel anytime he feels like it, there is no particular requirement that a kenel be tested before its released. It's happened a number of times that "stable" kernels have been released that have turned out to be quite broken, especially on non-x86 architectures.
So please read, enjoy, and put to good use:
-
Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel
-
Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
The OSDL kindly prepared Japanese translations but for some reason have taken them offline. I have copies though and will try to post them sometime soon.There are other articles on web application quality and C++ programming, with more to come. So far they are all under the GNU Free Documentation License.
I am actively seeking more translations if you want to help out.
It's a sober and informed discussion of engineering safety (mostly but not entirely computer related) that's been going on for almost twenty years.
Try entering "shuttle" in the search form. I did just now and found the brief, grim announcement of the Challenger explosion.
If you prefer to curl up with a dead tree by the fire, read moderator Peter Neumann's Computer Related Risks. It is also available in Japanese translation.
Now, few of us are likely to ever risk our lives flying in space shuttles. Maybe some of us might write the code or design the machinery the astronauts will trust with their lives. But all of us depend on computers every day for our livelihood, and many of us depend on them for our lives more than you would feel comfortable with if you understand the implications of it.
Fly on an airplane lately? Anything a little more modern than a DC-3? Do you know what fly by wire means? Ever write code with a stack overflow or heap corruption? What do you suppose that means for the embedded systems that run today's commercial aircraft?
Does your car have antilock brakes?
Read RISKS. It will make you a better programmer. Because it will put the fear of God into you.
While it focusses on reforming copyright laws, most of what I say applies to patents. Note that in the U.S. at least, patents have the same legal foundation as copyrights, being authorized by the same clause in the Constitution.
The steps I suggest are:
- Speak Out
- Vote
- Write to Your Elected Representatives
- Donate Money to Political Campaigns
- Support Campaign Finance Reform
- Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Practice Civil Disobedience
Well I don't think the EFF deals with patents but they do a lot of other good work.The above article is going to be put under a Creative Commons license to encourage copying as soon as I have the final draft done. I expect that to happen this weekend. So check back and copy the article to other websites when it's ready.
Also I closed my consulting business website a couple days ago and will keep it that way a couple more days.
While I don't get a huge amount of traffic to my homepage, I also don't expect most of the people visiting it to already be free software enthusiasts who know all about the patent controversy.
The copy on my own website has been served to about 5000 distinct hosts so far this month. A google search for "Let's Put SCO Behind Bars" turns up 2190 matches.
Most of those are links. The article has a Creative Commons license, and I've been encouraging copying. By doing various searches, and checking my logs for referring pages, I've found a few dozen other copies on the web, many of them on message boards where they've had lots of readers.
It turned out to be very helpful when Linux Universe asked me to submit my article there. They use UBB codes instead of HTML. I realized that lots of other message boards use UBB, so I saved a copy on my site in UBB format for people to copy to other message boards.
I've been meaning to write a plain-ascii version suitable for email and usenet but haven't gotten to it yet.
Both Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond enjoyed the article. Stallman said that if it weren't against his ethics to write proprietary code, he would have enjoyed working at the SCO of old as I described it.
My first draft I posted at Advogato, followed soon after by InfoAnarchy and then Kuro5hin.
However, I didn't succeed in getting Slashdot to feature it. One can only dream.
I have been hesitant to allow copying of many of my articles before now, but when one's objective is to get a lot of people to read what one has written, and to do so in a short time, it works wonders.
-
Let's Put SCO Behind Bars
All rational discourse with no foaming at the mouth.My objection is that it's not always possible to tell where one invention that's used in a program leaves off, and where another begins. Because it's often possible to re-order the lines of code in a program without altering its behaviour, it could easily happen that someone else's patented algorithm is mixed in to your program in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to find.
Please read:
It was a rather hurried job. I could use some suggestions on how to explain why software patents are bad, but written so concisely that one can read and understand the argument in the twenty seconds I wait before redirecting to the FFII site.
You may be interested to read my piece Change the Law. While it discusses what you can do about copyright law, patents in the U.S. are provided for by the same clause in the Constitution as copyrights, and what I suggest one can do to change the law is pretty much the same in any democratic country.
A friend of mine has operated a website called www.afm.com for quite some time. "AFM" stands for American Flea Market. A little while ago the American Film Marketing Assocation disputed the domain, saying that he was cybersquatting on their trademark. Their complaint filled a four-inch binder. He's operated the domain for several years before hearing from these jokers.
They accused any of everything from kidnapping the Lindbergh baby to crashing those planes into the World Trade Center. Oh, yeah, and Andy had weapons of mass destruction.
My friend is no fool. He fought the dispute tooth and nail, without any legal representation - and won, he got to keep his domain. But not everyone has been so lucky.
Andy put up a site about it called www.ShameOnTheAFMA.com, which has some resources that others could use to defend their domains.
I don't really know, but I would imaging that this would cause the schools to be liable for their students' copyright infringement.
This wouldn't apply to Universities to the extent that their students are adults, but it is common for people to attend Universities as minors if they ever got put ahead during grade school.
However, many musicians who offer downloads also offer their CDs for sale from their website. Really the best way to support a musician whose music downloads you like is to buy a CD from them.
Keep in mind that independent musicians who pay to have their own CDs pressed get to keep most of the money when they sell a CD. Thus it is possible for them to make a decent living while selling only a modest number of CDs.
Musicians who are signed with major labels only get 42 cents when they sell a CD, and they also have to cover the costs of their advance, marketing and promotion from the initial sales of their album. Thus it may be a long time before such musicians get any money from their CD sales, and some never get any money at all.
Copyright could be abolished tomorrow, in the US at least, if you could just get enough votes in congress to pass a bill to repeal copyright. That's not as difficult as it may sound, if you consider that more people share files with p2p apps in the US than voted for george bush.
Change the Law, a section from my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads discusses this in more detail, and suggests several specific steps you can take to reform the copyright laws and make filesharing legal:
- Speak Out
- Vote
- Write to Your Elected Representatives
- Donate Money to Political Campaigns
- Support Campaign Finance Reform
- Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Practice Civil Disobedience
Thank you for your attention.I have corrected in in my copy.
- Speak Out
- Vote
- Write to Your Elected Representatives
- Donate Money to Political Campaigns
- Support Campaign Finance Reform
- Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Practice Civil Disobedience
To which I should probably add:- Run for Elected Office
Thank you for your attention.It's just not very well known yet because it's only been in open source since the fall of 2000. Prior to that it was a proprietary API for the use of Andy Green and his clients Learning in Motion, who used it for such products as the client-server educational database Knowledge Forum.
ZooLib is written in C++, and can produce native executables for Linux/X11, Windows, BeOS, and Mac OS (classic and carbon) with very little need for platform-specific client code.
It makes only very basic use of platform-specific code internally, which is kept encapsulated, so it wouldn't be very hard to port it to a completely new platform. Porting to a new Unix platform that uses X11 shouldn't be more than a day's work, for example. Porting to a platform that had a completely alien GUI API would be a few weeks of work for someone familiar with both the platform and ZooLib.
ZooLib's website has a piece I wrote about why cross-platform frameworks are good for developers:
I explained that I had several linux systems, and that I understood there were some intellectual property issues, so I wanted to be sure to be covered.
The helpful and polite lady on the phone told me that the license program had been "suspended until further notice". She said she was pretty sure it had to do with the lawsuit.
May you should call too (800 726 8649) just to be sure.
That would just be wrong. I wouldn't do that even to be a /. moderator.
No, I'm doing this because I think it's the right thing to do.
It's not like I'm trying to keep it any kind of secret that I have posted this in the past.
May I should post as A-C so no one can claim I'm whoring.
-
http://www.goingware.com/notes/prosecute-sco.html
Here's the introduction: Also from the article: This page provides the article in the UBB code that some message boards use, with plain text coming soon. I'm also starting to post examples of letters that others have sent to their Attorney's General.Thanks for your help.
And in 1976, I wrote my first program in FORTRAN on a coding form, then typed it into a teletype terminal on an IBM 360 mainframe at the University of Idaho where my father was a E.E. grad student. I was twelve then.
One reason nowadays that most embedded developers host their development on Windows is that most embedded tools publishers only make their tools available to run on Windows. Often these tools, like compilers for arcane chips, are quite specialized, so the developer is left with no choice.
That said, I think whoever wrote the report is on crack if they think Windows is a better development environment than Linux. I have been doing embedded for a year now, and one of the main things I still dislike about it is that I have to do most of my development on Windows.
It is quite common for each compiler vendor to write their own integrated development environment, with an editor and integrated build system. But the market for these products are not as great as the market for IDEs for the development of desktop or server software, which means they can't invest in developing a more refined GUI for their IDEs, so their basic usability and quality is quite poor.
If you think Visual Studio is a lousy environment for development, you should try the ARM IDE or TI's Code Composer Studio. Using them is like pounding nails with your fists.
However, the situation is slowly starting to look up. GCC targets many embedded CPUs and is starting to become widely used for embedded development. The other GNU tools also form a more or less complete set of what you would need to develop embedded products, with GDB acting as both a debugger and simulator, LD able to function as an embedded linker, being able to do two-machine debugging with GDB and so on. Also there's GNU make, CVS and so on.
The result is that while I had to use the proprietary (and expensive) ARM compiler to develop for the Oxford Semiconductor ARM7TDMI-based 911 FireWire/IDE bridge chip (which allows you to hook up inexpensive IDE disk drives as firewire storage), they switched over to building their firmware with GCC for the 922 USB/FireWire/IDE 922 bridge chip.
I've been using GCC under Cygwin for my 922 development, but a CD with a new SDK on it is expected to arrive in the mail any day now. When it does, I will have a choice of Cygwin, Linux or Mac OS X development environments, all running the same version of GCC. And I'm very happy about that.
Most likely, though, I will use Mac OS X for my 922 development. I'd prefer using Linux to Windows, but if I can use Mac OS X, I'd prefer that to Linux, if for no other reason than the fact that the clipboard works correctly, as well as that I could use CodeWarrior to edit my source.
Maybe if I get real ambitious, I might write a CodeWarrior plugin so I can use the CodeWarrior IDE to compile my code with arm-elf-gcc.
(And don't give me crap about not using Emacs. I was an expert at Emacs when most of you were still in diapers. I still have my .emacs file which I first created in 1987. But I vastly prefer CodeWarrior's GUI text editor unless I have some reason to run a bunch of Emacs lisp code on my source file.)
-
articles by MichaelCrawford at
Kuro5hin
- GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tips (note - they cover a lot more than programming by now)
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Articles at
The Linux Quality Database
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Musings on Good C++ Style - published at K5 under my old username
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Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads
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Writing Cross-Platform Software - Getting Started
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Freeing the Developer from OS Vendor Shackles
There's more, but I'm getting tired of trying to find them all. Someday I'm going to track them all down again and put all the links on one page.I write about the importance of speaking your mind, and give some tips on how I am able to write so well on this page.
You should also be aware the Linus gets to release a new kernel whenever he wants. He does this when he thinks its the right time, for reasons that don't always involve reliability. He posts a new kernel release when he feels its ready, often without testing it particularly rigorously, and it has happened quite a few times that Linus has released a new "stable" kernel that turns out to be quite broken. It is actually quite common for the stable releases of the non-86 architectures to be quite buggy.
Finally, Linus announced on linux-kernel that the reason he released the first 2.4 stable kernel (2.4.0) was because he wanted more widespread testing, not because he felt it was ready to use. I wouldn't be surprised if he does this with 2.6. Both 2.2 and 2.4 went through several releases before they were really stabilized, and 2.4 has never been as reliable as the later 2.2 versions.
That's why I ask you to read:
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Why We Should Test the New Linux Kernel
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Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
The Open Source Development Lab's Japan development center used to have japanese translations of them but they don't seem to be online anymore. I'll track them down and post them here when I can find them.I am actively seeking further translations of these and the other articles that are at The Linux Quality Database. The articles are all under the GNU Free Documentation License so you can just grab them and translate away.
Thank you for your attention.
Every draft, though, has suggested that stockholders in any of the companies whose stock has been affected by SCO's shenanigans available themselves of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Investor Complaint Form.
The page points out that if you're concerned about security as your complaint is transmitted over the Internet, you can fill in all the fields, print it from your browser, then fax or snail mail it in.
The form is pretty detailed, to make sure they receive all the information they need. That suggests to me that the SEC pays attention to these complaints.