Its a sad but true fact that this set top will get nowhere. They don't seem to comprehend quite a few things, all of which will lead this to be unusable (compared to the PS2) as a game console. That fact will also hurt its sales as a set-top, because people can just buy the PS2 to get set-top capabilities PLUS awesome gaming. 1) Power, power power. The proc in this machine sounds something like an Athlon or PIII 600. That is ridiculously low powered compared to the 300 MHz emotion engine. You hear all those mac heads preaching MHz!=power. Well this is a case in point. The fp power of the Emotion Engine (herefoth refered to as the EE in amiga tradition) is much higher than a PIII. It is designed to do one thing well, 3D graphics calculations. It can be very parallel, and have a ton of hardware dedicated to just that task. There is no way anything below a 1.5 - 2GHz PIII will outperform it. Take a look at the special SH3 powering the Dreamcast. Remember the Top500 super computer list? Number 2 and 3 were measly 64 way SH based chips. Sure they might not be as hot as a 256 chip origin for general computing, but for their very specific task, they whoop. Thats they same family of chip thats in the dreamcast, and EE promises to be even better. Then take the GPU. Looks to be something like a GeForce. Might be nice, but remember, even in terms of clock speed the PS2 GPU outperforms it. (120MHz vs. 150 MHz) There are also a lot of optimizations in the architecture that the PS2 can make that the more general purpose PC arch can't. Then there is the 4 meg of EMBEDDED VRAM with a 150MHz bus and a ridiculous bus width (DDR eat your heart out.) I don't think I have to elaborate. 2) Selvteness. When will people learn that using the right tool for the right job is best. Why the hell did they decide to use Linux? Sure it is a great server or workstation OS, but is seriously too big for a gamestation. You can cut it down, but it even then it is still too big, and by the looks of the spec sheet, they seem to be using full blown Linux/X. This poses many problems. A) Linux is too fat for a console. A console has no need of many things that are in the kernel that can't be taken out. There is no need for all the security and multi-userness inherent in UNIX, no need for console support, no need for any process management (or memory protection for that matter) no need for a VM, no need swap management, etc. Again, these could probably be coded out, but that would be an assload of work, and most Linux progs wouldn't work afterwords. The PS/2 OS will be simple. Some libraries for setting of graphics, OpenGL, etc, talking to the hardware, taking to devices, and a TCP/IP stack. Most of all, it gets our of your way real fast. Don't be surprised if many game developers forgo OpenGL or whatever and access hardware directly. They've been doing it for years and on a platform that stays as constant as a console, they can tweek to give a massive speed boost. The best example is this. One the same hardware, current N64 games whoop what was available at its introduction. What PCs can do that? B) They're using X. (They say they use Mesa and DRI.) What kind of ridiculous interface is that? Am I to assume they'll write their own WM. Then who will re-write the apps to take advantage of it? Shoehorning a big UI into the wrong place has been seen before. Its called WindowsCE. And why the hell use DRI? What else is using the graphics hardware? C) Wheres the RAM? Sure it has 64 meg, but after Linux/X plus the WM, only like 16 or less will be left. You're telling me the console is going to hit the SWAP? 3) They're way out of their league in terms of customer slickness. First, Linux isn't that slick to begin with. I'll give them the benifit of the doubt and assume they can make Linux/X as easy to use as the playstation. (No boot sequence, no logging in, no actually even starting the app. Want to play a CD? Stick it in the drive and re-boot. The CD player app comes up.) Are people actually going to SHUTDOWN their console? Linux is way too unstable and buggy for consoles. Sure 100 days without a crash may seem stable to PC users, but console users would be up in arms if their console crashed three times a year! More like once every three years is about right. (My N64 has crashed once in 5 years, and my PC hasn't crashed in the 3 years I've owned it.) Second, I can't see people accepting the fact that their kernel needs to be updated. No, sorry, no dice. And the hardrive. The guy who decided to put in a harddrive ought to be shot. I say this because console software is released as good as it will ever get. It has to be, it can never be patched. People aren't going to accept, "please wait... Downloading latest patches for Mario 64." These people need to get a clue. This is a machine that everyone from age 6 to age 60 will be using. It can't be difficult, it can't be unstable (reletivly), it can't take energy to maintain. It has to be transparent to use, and be easy to use as your toaster. Literraly. Its nice to get Linux on yet another devices, but ask yourself people, how stupid of an idea is it?
Re:Is this a good idea?
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Laptop Exams?
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I agree with you about this to some extent. Particularly when you say when a person who needs to just look at a sheet to confirm memory. I don't think however, this is the kind of learning that the open net test will encourage. I think that this net test will encourage people to not look at the equations at all and just look them up during the test. The process of trying to memorize the equations leads to a lot of understanding on what they do. I'm not saying you should have them utterly memorized (though I probably sounded like that in my post) but you should be very comfortable with them. At least in my experiance, if I try to spend a while trying to memorize the equations, it is much easier for me to go through a problem because I basically already know where each piece of the problem will go.
I'm not quite sure if this is a good idea or not. I can see some places where this might work, plaes that generally do groups exams and such anyway, but isn't this really condusive to cheating? Or even if a person doesn't cheat, what do they learn if they can immediatly just look up the information on the net? Now you may say the memorizing needless facts that can be looked up anyway should not be important. To some extent I agree, but memorizing facts leads to a much stronger understanding of whats going on. Say I'm working on a complex physics problem. If I don't have all of the equations I need to know down cold, I probably won't be able to use them together to solve a problem. Memorizing doesn't just ential knowing each term of an equations. Memorizing leads to a deep understanding of that concept, how and where to use it, and any details about using it. A person who needs to look these equations up will be nowhere near as succesful on a problem as one who knows them by heart because the person who has memorized them knows every detail about them and knows how to use them together to solve a problem.
No, not at all. They couldn't be sued, because they own the software. Say I'm an MS employee and write a piece of software which I put into the Linux kernel. The act of putting it into the Linux kernel indirectly puts the software under the GPL. Now Microsoft can come along at anytime and sue me for doing that. I'm their employee, and thus they own that code. Thus, it is not my desicion what license it should be put under. When I put it into the Linux kernel, I put it under the GPL. However, I did not do it legally, thus the GPL cannot apply, and MS has every right to rip that software out of the kernel.
Microsoft's contract with the employee. If the software wasn't allowed to be GPL in the first place, MS would have every right to revoke that license. The guy who wrote it would get in trouble, and the code would be returned to MS. For example, if I work at MS, and I sign the no compete contract. Then, I write an amazing new VM for Linux, and place it under the GPL. A year passes, and by now my VM is a critical part of the system. MS then finds out, and fire me and revokes the license. Now the GPL can't control that. It says if you use GPL software in a propriotory program you're in trouble. It doesn't say that if you use propriotory code in a GPL program it automatically becomes GPL. In this case the VM would be propriotory code, and GPL would not control how it was licensed.
Thats ridiculous. Nobody uses Linux at home. If a Linux running home computer is not offered at CompUSA/BestBuy, etc, Linux cannot have anywhere near 4%. Maybe 4% of business desktops, but even that I doubt. Right now, there are maybe a 10 to 20 thousand people who use Linux as their home desktop machine. Nothing compared to the dozens of millions of home users there are. I think the real number is around.01% or so.
From what I was able to scrounge up from various sources, I've determined the following. A) No-one uses Solaris for multimedia. B) Solaris 8 is pretty fast, but for single proc. performance it is still slower than FreeBSD. C) Even the x86 version is really fast for dual procs. D) The sound system isn't anything special. Its straight OSS. E) They do have some media apps, especially speech recognition and multimedia authoring. F) Doesn't really support graphics cards that well. (In SunX) So I guess Solaris is out. Anyone know if IRIX is coming to x86?
) More and more of the old school UNIX vendors will stop producing their own UNIX and switch to Linux, especially on or around the time when they release new (incompatible) hardware. >> Better hope not. I doubt a bunch of hackers can better tailor their software to their system then they can.
I expect AIX to go sometime around the end of 2001, sooner if Linux can develop the features (HA clustering, journaling FS, etc) that AIX has but Linux doesn't. Expect to see more and more IBM UNIX developer-type folks working full-time on the Linux kernel instead of on AIX. >> Lets hope AIX survives. Do you really want to buy a $30,000 RS/600 and run some crappy unix clone on it, one that originated on i386 no less? (Not a troll comment, but compared to AIX on POWER, Linux on POWER is a crappy UNIX clone.)
SCO will not see 2002. Neither will HP-UX. >> Better hope HP-UX survives. I don't think Linux runs on PA-RISC, and if it does, its probably a pretty alpha port.
Solaris will hold out the longest, but the Linux tide will overwhelm it by 2005. >> Maybe, but when Linux can scale to 128 procs (it can't really do 2 that well now)
2) We'll see a rise in the use of the *BSD family for the next couple of years, but as more and more people are exposed to the GPL through Linux, more and more people will _expect_ the GPL on their software. Sometime around 2003 the upwards trend will reverse, and *BSD will slowly slide to obscurity and historical curiosity - made worse as it loses developer mindshare to Linux. >> Again, better hope BSD doesn't die. What would happen to all the servers that need the unity and rock solidity that BSD brings?
3) I expect that the governments of the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, and Germany will require the GPL on all software in use in government institutions by 2004. >> Doubt it. GPL is a license. The government would never do something that stupid, (like they did when they tried to make ADA the official language.) Say I come up with a critical piece of weather software that I'm selling for $50000. No way in hell I'm GPLing that. And you're telling me a bunch of hackers will be able to come up with something that good in a timely manner? When you show me a GPL product that can seriously stand up to its propriotory competition at something, I'll listen, but until then, its just talk.
4) Microsoft will declare bankruptcy by the end of 2005. The stock value will peak in early 2002. >> Uh no, thats only 2 years away. Linux will be luck if it has 5% of home users by then. 5) We will see one more Windows release post-Win2k. So there will be Win2K, a stopgap WinFoo, and then that's all she wrote.
6) By 2010, the concept of "selling software" will seem as alien as selling air, or sunlight. >> They'd better be selling software, or else people wouldn't be making money. You speak as if UNIX will take over the world. I for one will never use UNIX as for my media stuff until it can equal what BeOS is today. (But BeOS will be a lot more by then. The OS might die, but the concept of a light media OS won't.) Linux might take over the UNIX market, but believe it or not, there are many people who don't really think UNIX is the OS used by god.
Hey, is anyone where running Solaris 8 on a single proc. Pentium II box? I want to put a UNIX on my desktop, and am thinking of Solaris because I don't really love Linux and its hodgepodge style (personal preference) and I would use FreeBSD but people bitch about its sound code. I do a lot of media stuff, so thats very important. Anyway, I'm used to using BeOS, so I'm a little pampered on the interactive performance front. Anyone using it who could tell me how it performs compared to Linux for 3D/2D graphics, media, and general use. (Clicking on files, word processing, moving around the system with the GUI. etc?) I heard that 7.0 used to be called Slowaris on Intel, how is 8.0?
Actually, CE is a pretty damn good OS in its own right. It is influenced by NT, offers DirectX support in some versions, is fairly light, fairly memory conserving, fast, and fairly stable. Might suck as a palmtop OS (too big) but would be pretty nifty as a general purpose desktop OS. If the Sound/Input/Graphics/Music parts of the Win32 API were taken out of CE, and ones based on DirectX with some extra libraries over them to implement some easier to code functionality, it might make a fairly good general purpose OS. The reason is that A) It already runs on x86. The only thing that would be needed would be to tweek it for the architecture. B) It already runs on a lot of RISC procs. Should be fairly easy to port it to some more. The code base is probably protable because it runs on x86, MIPS, and SH3. C) Most hardware already has DirectX drivers. Small tweeks and a recompile might be necessary, but could be doable. D) DirectX on this system rocks. It is pretty deeply embedded. Imagine, your normal desktop being drawn through DirectDraw, ultra low latency sound through DirectSound, and low overhead input from DirectInput. Okay, enough about DirectX, I think you get the point. E) At an 8 meg memory footprint (maybe 16 meg if you put all the other stuff I mentioned) it would whoop Linux/X, Windows, and most of the other GUI OSs out there. (Even BeOS needs 32meg to feel like BeOS) F) Back to DirectX, the driver model is greatly simplified, giving a smaller chance of stuff breaking. You do realize that MS is standing there with an OS that with a few months of careful coding, could easily become a very kick-ass Windows 2001.
Why don't moderators browse at -1? This AC has a valid point. Are you telling me that his comment, at score 0, is worse than THIS { As most users in the corporate world already know, WinCE is the one and only operation system to run. It is the best OS ever written. I run everything on CE, it totally rules.
I asked my friends and they all agreed that CE is the best OS in the whole world. Why anyone else would write anything that would compete with this wonderful OS is beyond me. CE runs games and solitare, and doesnt crash much. What else can you ask for?
I think everyone should be running CE and i cant figure out why Microsoft would release the source. I think they must be losing their minds... LONG LIVE CE!!
Brought to you by an adoring fan of the Natalie Portman fan club. } comment which scores 1? C'mon folks, MS might be bad, but nothing gives moderators the right to be baised like that.
Still wrong. It does process a stream of instructions, but that is exactly what a thread is! Whats to say that it can't process 2 streams of instructions? The guy above is still wrong, the POWER4 is two chips, but multiple threads CAN be done on the proc level. I think (don't quote me, I read it a long time ago on/.) that the Sun MAJC can process two threads. It goes like this. If one thread is say an OpenGL transform thread, while the other is a rasterization thread, whats to keep the transform thread from using the fp units while the raster threads uses the integer units? Or two transform threads sharing 4 fp units? 3D in general is hidously parallel. Again, I'm not quite sure, but I think someone is working on a multithreaded open gl implementation that uses multiple threads. Seriously, though, it makes sense. Whats to stop one proc from doing the matrix multiplys on verticies 1-1000, while the other does it on 1001-2000?
No, its two complete cores. And what do you mean the second proc would be sitting there unused? The stuff that this proc is going to be used for is highly parallel. Even most media stuff is parallel. Load BeOS up on a dual proc box and run a few media apps. You'll see that both procs have pretty high utilization.
I must say that I'm glad to see that the Linux people aren't waging a holy war trying to say that this belongs on freshmeat this time. That out of the way, I'm pretty happy that this release is out. I've been holding of trying FreeBSD until 4.0 came out and this gives me a good excuse to hit cheapbytes.com for a purchase:) Anyway, has anybody used 4.0 yet? I noticed that the release talked a lot about performance improvements in various places, particularly the VM subsystem. Do these amount to much? Also, exactly how suitable is FreeBSD for the desktop? It seems much more organized than Linux, and they seem to tweek it quite well. I've heard, however, that multimedia on FreeBSD isn't as evolved as it is on Linux. Any substantiations to these?
I'm fully expecting that when IT managers are looking to do their next round of upgrades, Linux will be picked more often than W2K. IT people are tired of Redmond. Tired of the security problems of a bloated, closed-source OS, tired of service packs, tired of having to run around rebooting servers that forget to malloc their gig of RAM. W2K will be just another round of expensive, kludgely fixes and poor performance.
>>> Yes, people ARE tired of the security problems, instability, and price. HOWEVER, they could care less about it being open source; with X and the current state of desktops Linux is just as bloated as windows; MS releases services packes every few months, Linux releases a new kernel rev every few weeks and core apps (believe it or not X and KDE and GNOME and their attendant libs are part of the OS to most people.) are update every few weeks. Finally, W2K does not perform poorly. It takes up space, but if you've got 128 meg of RAM, it is just as fast as KDE and a hair faster than GNOME on my system. And IE is nowhere near as bloated as Netscape. Yes, W2K is pretty bad, but don't lie about it. And Linux isn't exactly the greatest OS ever made either.
I doubt NT was supposed to be a UNIX killer for you hardcore users. People used to 100 day uptimes and the whole multi-user thing could never adapt to NT. As for more casual users, well, NT succeded. In that market, unix IS dead. PS. The fact that its kicking ascii shows how dated parts of it are becoming. All major OSs (ie. NT and BeOS) have moved onto unicode.
Actually, I don't really think that's a big deal. If anything, its probably pretty common for 3D cards, I'm sure the GeForce and TNT2 have it as well. Anybody have any hard data to back this up?
Whoa, got my ass whooped. Didn't realize that the FSF maintains an "approved" license list. However, my statement still stands, don't let the GPL get to your head. And doesn't having a list of "approved" licenses smack of, like, church doctrine or something? Am I a heretic if I don't use an "approved" license. They should change the name to something like, "licenses supported by the FSF" or something.
First, what exactly do you consider an "approved" OpenSource license? Don't let your love affair with the L/GPL make you say something stupid. How can an Open Source license be "approved?" Does BSD count as an "approved" license? How about the X license. Why doesn't community source count as an "approved license." I don't particularly like the GPL, but is it still "upapproved?" Say you like, but don't blurt out something as a fact if its just your opinion. (IE. It was released under a license I approve of.) That said, I think that this is a pretty awesome thing for the spread of Java. Say what you will, but Sun was doing a lot to make Java not very appitizing for a lot of other OSs. This also means that non *NIX OSes will get some of the Java action. (Yea, I know it runs on NT. And Mac...kinda) However, I really don't like Java, so I'm not quite sure if I want it to spread. But to each his own, and we can always use another option.
Ha, a UNIX user talking about overhead? UNIX has the most overhead of any OS available, (aside from maybe windows and the old MacOS. Still, even NT's graphics system is a ton faster than X's) And hand holding and ease of use is not inversly proportional to power and flexibility. Take a look at BeOS. It has the overhead of a embedded system (okay, a bit of a strech, but its pretty close) and is as easy to use as a Mac. Yet it gives up very little of the flexibility of a UNIX. If you poke in,/etc is still there, you can use most Linux CLI apps. In fact, it is probably even more flexible because apps can be easily scripted. Sure you can't change the window manager, but thats about the extent of it.
I got news for you. Sad news, but true. NO COMPANY CARES ABOUT THE LINUX MOVEMENT'S IDEALS. They are all in it to make the money. Thats the whole core of a business. They could like nothing better than to be able to release only closed source, non-free apps if the Linux market would stand for it. You can't blame them. Aside for the people involved in the movement, no one really cares about the ideal behind the GPL. Why should they? A company isn't there to make life nicer for the user, if they do, thats a nice benefit, but they're in it to make money. Take nVidia. Great company. The users (aside from the Linux fundementalists) love them, they make good products at nice prices. Their primary goal, however, is not to advance accelerator technology, or make 3D a nicer experiance for the user. Their primary purpose is to make money. Sure the engineers involved probably take a great deal of pride in their work, but the company as a whole could care less. Thats life.
Open Source software is nice, but isn't necessary. An end user should not have to debug software. They can submit bug reports, they don't have to write patches. OpenSourcing an expensive piece of software like this is ridiculous. Notice that only the Linux version is free. The real cash machine, the Windows version, still requires payment. This isn't like GNOME or something, that people do on their free time. People go to work each day and write this code. They get paid, and millions have been invested in this code. Sure, if you don't like it, you can code it yourself. But if you want to use this, then you have to recognize that it takes money to create professional software, which is recouped when the software is sold. You don't have to use it, no one is making you. I suspect, however, that you really want to because your Open Source apps don't meet your needs. Say what you will, but I have yet to see an Open Source app that rivals its propriotory counterpart.
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Its a sad but true fact that this set top will get nowhere. They don't seem to comprehend quite a few things, all of which will lead this to be unusable (compared to the PS2) as a game console. That fact will also hurt its sales as a set-top, because people can just buy the PS2 to get set-top capabilities PLUS awesome gaming.
1) Power, power power. The proc in this machine sounds something like an Athlon or PIII 600. That is ridiculously low powered compared to the 300 MHz emotion engine. You hear all those mac heads preaching MHz!=power. Well this is a case in point. The fp power of the Emotion Engine (herefoth refered to as the EE in amiga tradition) is much higher than a PIII. It is designed to do one thing well, 3D graphics calculations. It can be very parallel, and have a ton of hardware dedicated to just that task. There is no way anything below a 1.5 - 2GHz PIII will outperform it. Take a look at the special SH3 powering the Dreamcast. Remember the Top500 super computer list? Number 2 and 3 were measly 64 way SH based chips. Sure they might not be as hot as a 256 chip origin for general computing, but for their very specific task, they whoop. Thats they same family of chip thats in the dreamcast, and EE promises to be even better. Then take the GPU. Looks to be something like a GeForce. Might be nice, but remember, even in terms of clock speed the PS2 GPU outperforms it. (120MHz vs. 150 MHz) There are also a lot of optimizations in the architecture that the PS2 can make that the more general purpose PC arch can't. Then there is the 4 meg of EMBEDDED VRAM with a 150MHz bus and a ridiculous bus width (DDR eat your heart out.) I don't think I have to elaborate.
2) Selvteness. When will people learn that using the right tool for the right job is best. Why the hell did they decide to use Linux? Sure it is a great server or workstation OS, but is seriously too big for a gamestation. You can cut it down, but it even then it is still too big, and by the looks of the spec sheet, they seem to be using full blown Linux/X. This poses many problems.
A) Linux is too fat for a console. A console has no need of many things that are in the kernel that can't be taken out. There is no need for all the security and multi-userness inherent in UNIX, no need for console support, no need for any process management (or memory protection for that matter) no need for a VM, no need swap management, etc. Again, these could probably be coded out, but that would be an assload of work, and most Linux progs wouldn't work afterwords. The PS/2 OS will be simple. Some libraries for setting of graphics, OpenGL, etc, talking to the hardware, taking to devices, and a TCP/IP stack. Most of all, it gets our of your way real fast. Don't be surprised if many game developers forgo OpenGL or whatever and access hardware directly. They've been doing it for years and on a platform that stays as constant as a console, they can tweek to give a massive speed boost. The best example is this. One the same hardware, current N64 games whoop what was available at its introduction. What PCs can do that?
B) They're using X. (They say they use Mesa and DRI.) What kind of ridiculous interface is that? Am I to assume they'll write their own WM. Then who will re-write the apps to take advantage of it? Shoehorning a big UI into the wrong place has been seen before. Its called WindowsCE. And why the hell use DRI? What else is using the graphics hardware?
C) Wheres the RAM? Sure it has 64 meg, but after Linux/X plus the WM, only like 16 or less will be left. You're telling me the console is going to hit the SWAP?
3) They're way out of their league in terms of customer slickness. First, Linux isn't that slick to begin with. I'll give them the benifit of the doubt and assume they can make Linux/X as easy to use as the playstation. (No boot sequence, no logging in, no actually even starting the app. Want to play a CD? Stick it in the drive and re-boot. The CD player app comes up.) Are people actually going to SHUTDOWN their console? Linux is way too unstable and buggy for consoles. Sure 100 days without a crash may seem stable to PC users, but console users would be up in arms if their console crashed three times a year! More like once every three years is about right. (My N64 has crashed once in 5 years, and my PC hasn't crashed in the 3 years I've owned it.) Second, I can't see people accepting the fact that their kernel needs to be updated. No, sorry, no dice. And the hardrive. The guy who decided to put in a harddrive ought to be shot. I say this because console software is released as good as it will ever get. It has to be, it can never be patched. People aren't going to accept, "please wait... Downloading latest patches for Mario 64."
These people need to get a clue. This is a machine that everyone from age 6 to age 60 will be using. It can't be difficult, it can't be unstable (reletivly), it can't take energy to maintain. It has to be transparent to use, and be easy to use as your toaster. Literraly. Its nice to get Linux on yet another devices, but ask yourself people, how stupid of an idea is it?
I agree with you about this to some extent. Particularly when you say when a person who needs to just look at a sheet to confirm memory. I don't think however, this is the kind of learning that the open net test will encourage. I think that this net test will encourage people to not look at the equations at all and just look them up during the test. The process of trying to memorize the equations leads to a lot of understanding on what they do. I'm not saying you should have them utterly memorized (though I probably sounded like that in my post) but you should be very comfortable with them. At least in my experiance, if I try to spend a while trying to memorize the equations, it is much easier for me to go through a problem because I basically already know where each piece of the problem will go.
I'm not quite sure if this is a good idea or not. I can see some places where this might work, plaes that generally do groups exams and such anyway, but isn't this really condusive to cheating? Or even if a person doesn't cheat, what do they learn if they can immediatly just look up the information on the net? Now you may say the memorizing needless facts that can be looked up anyway should not be important. To some extent I agree, but memorizing facts leads to a much stronger understanding of whats going on. Say I'm working on a complex physics problem. If I don't have all of the equations I need to know down cold, I probably won't be able to use them together to solve a problem. Memorizing doesn't just ential knowing each term of an equations. Memorizing leads to a deep understanding of that concept, how and where to use it, and any details about using it. A person who needs to look these equations up will be nowhere near as succesful on a problem as one who knows them by heart because the person who has memorized them knows every detail about them and knows how to use them together to solve a problem.
No, not at all. They couldn't be sued, because they own the software. Say I'm an MS employee and write a piece of software which I put into the Linux kernel. The act of putting it into the Linux kernel indirectly puts the software under the GPL. Now Microsoft can come along at anytime and sue me for doing that. I'm their employee, and thus they own that code. Thus, it is not my desicion what license it should be put under. When I put it into the Linux kernel, I put it under the GPL. However, I did not do it legally, thus the GPL cannot apply, and MS has every right to rip that software out of the kernel.
Microsoft's contract with the employee. If the software wasn't allowed to be GPL in the first place, MS would have every right to revoke that license. The guy who wrote it would get in trouble, and the code would be returned to MS. For example, if I work at MS, and I sign the no compete contract. Then, I write an amazing new VM for Linux, and place it under the GPL. A year passes, and by now my VM is a critical part of the system. MS then finds out, and fire me and revokes the license. Now the GPL can't control that. It says if you use GPL software in a propriotory program you're in trouble. It doesn't say that if you use propriotory code in a GPL program it automatically becomes GPL. In this case the VM would be propriotory code, and GPL would not control how it was licensed.
Thats ridiculous. Nobody uses Linux at home. If a Linux running home computer is not offered at CompUSA/BestBuy, etc, Linux cannot have anywhere near 4%. Maybe 4% of business desktops, but even that I doubt. Right now, there are maybe a 10 to 20 thousand people who use Linux as their home desktop machine. Nothing compared to the dozens of millions of home users there are. I think the real number is around .01% or so.
From what I was able to scrounge up from various sources, I've determined the following.
A) No-one uses Solaris for multimedia.
B) Solaris 8 is pretty fast, but for single proc. performance it is still slower than FreeBSD.
C) Even the x86 version is really fast for dual procs.
D) The sound system isn't anything special. Its straight OSS.
E) They do have some media apps, especially speech recognition and multimedia authoring.
F) Doesn't really support graphics cards that well. (In SunX)
So I guess Solaris is out. Anyone know if IRIX is coming to x86?
BSD for server. beos for workstation
) More and more of the old school UNIX vendors will stop producing their own UNIX and switch to Linux, especially on or around the time when they release new (incompatible) hardware.
>> Better hope not. I doubt a bunch of hackers can better tailor their software to their system then they can.
I expect AIX to go sometime around the end of 2001, sooner if Linux can develop the features (HA clustering, journaling FS, etc) that AIX has but Linux doesn't. Expect to see more and more IBM UNIX developer-type folks working full-time on the Linux kernel instead of on AIX.
>> Lets hope AIX survives. Do you really want to buy a $30,000 RS/600 and run some crappy unix clone on it, one that originated on i386 no less? (Not a troll comment, but compared to AIX on POWER, Linux on POWER is a crappy UNIX clone.)
SCO will not see 2002. Neither will HP-UX.
>> Better hope HP-UX survives. I don't think Linux runs on PA-RISC, and if it does, its probably a pretty alpha port.
Solaris will hold out the longest, but the Linux tide will overwhelm it by 2005.
>> Maybe, but when Linux can scale to 128 procs (it can't really do 2 that well now)
2) We'll see a rise in the use of the *BSD family for the next couple of years, but as more and more people are exposed to the GPL through Linux, more and more people will _expect_ the GPL on their software. Sometime around 2003 the upwards trend will reverse, and *BSD will slowly slide to obscurity and historical curiosity - made worse as it loses developer mindshare to Linux.
>> Again, better hope BSD doesn't die. What would happen to all the servers that need the unity and rock solidity that BSD brings?
3) I expect that the governments of the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, and Germany will require the GPL on all software in use in government institutions by 2004.
>> Doubt it. GPL is a license. The government would never do something that stupid, (like they did when they tried to make ADA the official language.) Say I come up with a critical piece of weather software that I'm selling for $50000. No way in hell I'm GPLing that. And you're telling me a bunch of hackers will be able to come up with something that good in a timely manner? When you show me a GPL product that can seriously stand up to its propriotory competition at something, I'll listen, but until then, its just talk.
4) Microsoft will declare bankruptcy by the end of 2005. The stock value will peak in early 2002.
>> Uh no, thats only 2 years away. Linux will be luck if it has 5% of home users by then.
5) We will see one more Windows release post-Win2k. So there will be Win2K, a stopgap WinFoo, and then that's all she wrote.
6) By 2010, the concept of "selling software" will seem as alien as selling air, or sunlight. >> They'd better be selling software, or else people wouldn't be making money.
You speak as if UNIX will take over the world. I for one will never use UNIX as for my media stuff until it can equal what BeOS is today. (But BeOS will be a lot more by then. The OS might die, but the concept of a light media OS won't.) Linux might take over the UNIX market, but believe it or not, there are many people who don't really think UNIX is the OS used by god.
Hey, is anyone where running Solaris 8 on a single proc. Pentium II box? I want to put a UNIX on my desktop, and am thinking of Solaris because I don't really love Linux and its hodgepodge style (personal preference) and I would use FreeBSD but people bitch about its sound code. I do a lot of media stuff, so thats very important. Anyway, I'm used to using BeOS, so I'm a little pampered on the interactive performance front. Anyone using it who could tell me how it performs compared to Linux for 3D/2D graphics, media, and general use. (Clicking on files, word processing, moving around the system with the GUI. etc?) I heard that 7.0 used to be called Slowaris on Intel, how is 8.0?
Actually, CE is a pretty damn good OS in its own right. It is influenced by NT, offers DirectX support in some versions, is fairly light, fairly memory conserving, fast, and fairly stable. Might suck as a palmtop OS (too big) but would be pretty nifty as a general purpose desktop OS. If the Sound/Input/Graphics/Music parts of the Win32 API were taken out of CE, and ones based on DirectX with some extra libraries over them to implement some easier to code functionality, it might make a fairly good general purpose OS. The reason is that
A) It already runs on x86. The only thing that would be needed would be to tweek it for the architecture.
B) It already runs on a lot of RISC procs. Should be fairly easy to port it to some more. The code base is probably protable because it runs on x86, MIPS, and SH3.
C) Most hardware already has DirectX drivers. Small tweeks and a recompile might be necessary, but could be doable.
D) DirectX on this system rocks. It is pretty deeply embedded. Imagine, your normal desktop being drawn through DirectDraw, ultra low latency sound through DirectSound, and low overhead input from DirectInput. Okay, enough about DirectX, I think you get the point.
E) At an 8 meg memory footprint (maybe 16 meg if you put all the other stuff I mentioned) it would whoop Linux/X, Windows, and most of the other GUI OSs out there. (Even BeOS needs 32meg to feel like BeOS)
F) Back to DirectX, the driver model is greatly simplified, giving a smaller chance of stuff breaking.
You do realize that MS is standing there with an OS that with a few months of careful coding, could easily become a very kick-ass Windows 2001.
Why don't moderators browse at -1? This AC has a valid point. Are you telling me that his comment, at score 0, is worse than THIS
{
As most users in the corporate world already know, WinCE is the one and only operation system to run. It is the best OS ever written. I run everything on CE, it totally rules.
I asked my friends and they all agreed that CE is the best OS in the whole world. Why anyone else would write anything that would compete with this wonderful OS is beyond me. CE runs games and solitare, and doesnt crash much. What else can you ask for?
I think everyone should be running CE and i cant figure out why Microsoft would release the source. I think they must be losing their minds... LONG LIVE CE!!
Brought to you by an adoring fan of the Natalie Portman fan club.
} comment which scores 1? C'mon folks, MS might be bad, but nothing gives moderators the right to be baised like that.
Still wrong. It does process a stream of instructions, but that is exactly what a thread is! Whats to say that it can't process 2 streams of instructions? The guy above is still wrong, the POWER4 is two chips, but multiple threads CAN be done on the proc level. I think (don't quote me, I read it a long time ago on /.) that the Sun MAJC can process two threads. It goes like this. If one thread is say an OpenGL transform thread, while the other is a rasterization thread, whats to keep the transform thread from using the fp units while the raster threads uses the integer units? Or two transform threads sharing 4 fp units? 3D in general is hidously parallel. Again, I'm not quite sure, but I think someone is working on a multithreaded open gl implementation that uses multiple threads. Seriously, though, it makes sense. Whats to stop one proc from doing the matrix multiplys on verticies 1-1000, while the other does it on 1001-2000?
No, its two complete cores. And what do you mean the second proc would be sitting there unused? The stuff that this proc is going to be used for is highly parallel. Even most media stuff is parallel. Load BeOS up on a dual proc box and run a few media apps. You'll see that both procs have pretty high utilization.
I must say that I'm glad to see that the Linux people aren't waging a holy war trying to say that this belongs on freshmeat this time. That out of the way, I'm pretty happy that this release is out. I've been holding of trying FreeBSD until 4.0 came out and this gives me a good excuse to hit cheapbytes.com for a purchase :) Anyway, has anybody used 4.0 yet? I noticed that the release talked a lot about performance improvements in various places, particularly the VM subsystem. Do these amount to much? Also, exactly how suitable is FreeBSD for the desktop? It seems much more organized than Linux, and they seem to tweek it quite well. I've heard, however, that multimedia on FreeBSD isn't as evolved as it is on Linux. Any substantiations to these?
I'm fully expecting that when IT managers are looking to do their next round of upgrades, Linux will be picked more often than W2K. IT people are tired of Redmond. Tired of the security problems of a bloated, closed-source OS, tired of service packs, tired of having to run around rebooting servers that forget to malloc their gig of RAM. W2K will be just another round of expensive, kludgely fixes and poor performance.
>>> Yes, people ARE tired of the security problems, instability, and price. HOWEVER, they could care less about it being open source; with X and the current state of desktops Linux is just as bloated as windows; MS releases services packes every few months, Linux releases a new kernel rev every few weeks and core apps (believe it or not X and KDE and GNOME and their attendant libs are part of the OS to most people.) are update every few weeks. Finally, W2K does not perform poorly. It takes up space, but if you've got 128 meg of RAM, it is just as fast as KDE and a hair faster than GNOME on my system. And IE is nowhere near as bloated as Netscape. Yes, W2K is pretty bad, but don't lie about it. And Linux isn't exactly the greatest OS ever made either.
I doubt NT was supposed to be a UNIX killer for you hardcore users. People used to 100 day uptimes and the whole multi-user thing could never adapt to NT. As for more casual users, well, NT succeded. In that market, unix IS dead.
PS. The fact that its kicking ascii shows how dated parts of it are becoming. All major OSs (ie. NT and BeOS) have moved onto unicode.
Actually, I don't really think that's a big deal. If anything, its probably pretty common for 3D cards, I'm sure the GeForce and TNT2 have it as well. Anybody have any hard data to back this up?
Whoa, got my ass whooped. Didn't realize that the FSF maintains an "approved" license list. However, my statement still stands, don't let the GPL get to your head. And doesn't having a list of "approved" licenses smack of, like, church doctrine or something? Am I a heretic if I don't use an "approved" license. They should change the name to something like, "licenses supported by the FSF" or something.
Thanks. It looks pretty stupid when you have a sig misspelled doesn't it!
Excuse me, I didn't quite catch that. (The subtlety might be over my head.) Is my quote attributed to the wrong person?
First, what exactly do you consider an "approved" OpenSource license? Don't let your love affair with the L/GPL make you say something stupid. How can an Open Source license be "approved?" Does BSD count as an "approved" license? How about the X license. Why doesn't community source count as an "approved license." I don't particularly like the GPL, but is it still "upapproved?" Say you like, but don't blurt out something as a fact if its just your opinion. (IE. It was released under a license I approve of.) That said, I think that this is a pretty awesome thing for the spread of Java. Say what you will, but Sun was doing a lot to make Java not very appitizing for a lot of other OSs. This also means that non *NIX OSes will get some of the Java action. (Yea, I know it runs on NT. And Mac...kinda) However, I really don't like Java, so I'm not quite sure if I want it to spread. But to each his own, and we can always use another option.
Ha, a UNIX user talking about overhead? UNIX has the most overhead of any OS available, (aside from maybe windows and the old MacOS. Still, even NT's graphics system is a ton faster than X's) And hand holding and ease of use is not inversly proportional to power and flexibility. Take a look at BeOS. It has the overhead of a embedded system (okay, a bit of a strech, but its pretty close) and is as easy to use as a Mac. Yet it gives up very little of the flexibility of a UNIX. If you poke in, /etc is still there, you can use most Linux CLI apps. In fact, it is probably even more flexible because apps can be easily scripted. Sure you can't change the window manager, but thats about the extent of it.
I got news for you. Sad news, but true.
NO COMPANY CARES ABOUT THE LINUX MOVEMENT'S IDEALS. They are all in it to make the money. Thats the whole core of a business. They could like nothing better than to be able to release only closed source, non-free apps if the Linux market would stand for it. You can't blame them. Aside for the people involved in the movement, no one really cares about the ideal behind the GPL. Why should they? A company isn't there to make life nicer for the user, if they do, thats a nice benefit, but they're in it to make money. Take nVidia. Great company. The users (aside from the Linux fundementalists) love them, they make good products at nice prices. Their primary goal, however, is not to advance accelerator technology, or make 3D a nicer experiance for the user. Their primary purpose is to make money. Sure the engineers involved probably take a great deal of pride in their work, but the company as a whole could care less. Thats life.
Open Source software is nice, but isn't necessary. An end user should not have to debug software. They can submit bug reports, they don't have to write patches. OpenSourcing an expensive piece of software like this is ridiculous. Notice that only the Linux version is free. The real cash machine, the Windows version, still requires payment. This isn't like GNOME or something, that people do on their free time. People go to work each day and write this code. They get paid, and millions have been invested in this code. Sure, if you don't like it, you can code it yourself. But if you want to use this, then you have to recognize that it takes money to create professional software, which is recouped when the software is sold. You don't have to use it, no one is making you. I suspect, however, that you really want to because your Open Source apps don't meet your needs. Say what you will, but I have yet to see an Open Source app that rivals its propriotory counterpart.