I certainly wasn't talking about intentionally changing the setup.
If your changing the system intentionally rather than because it doesn't function properly, that is a completely new investment altogether and NOT part your TCO calculations.
True true, but then the open source ideology gets the job done better than the closed source ideology.
Oh it might not in this or that area at the moment, but history has proven, and will inevitably continue to prove for the foreseeable future, that open source will get to this or that area sooner or later.
Open source doesn't have to release in time to make it's quarterly. It doesn't have to compete, it can lag behind something else today and spend the next 5 or 10 or 20yrs catching up other areas before getting around to it. Open source does not and cannot die. There really is no debating this.
Where the community concentrates their efforts and have been given the time to show the fruits of their labor no commercial entity even begins to compare. More and more we will see projects mature and close source companies ousted. After all, there is no way a commercial entity could compete with the much more yet, yet infinately more stable and secure development which goes hand and hand with open source.
Not really, samba actually does file and print using their own protocols.
It's faster and scales better than the Microsoft implementations by all accounts.
Alot of the theories of samba requiring so much more administration assume dancing through firehoops to get directory services.
First directory services are severly overrated, and second their only benefit is reduced administration. If you must roll your own dancing through firehoops solution to get them, they aren't worth it. And since alot of these companies are coming from nt 4 to begin with, it's just out and out ridiculous.
Even without samba though, cups printing is equally easy, and from a technical standpoint, far superior to anything MS offers. So we are really talking about filesharing.
Either way though, novell will be resolving the directory services issue and extra overhead required to set everything up to begin with. So once it enters the market, there will be a much more tangible initial cost savings as well as the long term admin costs (or lack thereof).
True enough, but there are no license costs and using Linux and/or BSD requires less of ones time?
I don't mean at the outset, in fact a linux solution can take MORE time to setup initially. But since it is generally setup and never touched again that is the only time investment.
As opposed to windows, which requires at least a few minutes of your time everyday, and another dose of an hour or two about once a month. It adds up to more than the extra hour spent configuring linux fairly quickly.
If you do NOT know the advantages there really isn't any difference between the two?
Especially on a kiosk where there is only one webpage they can view? The interface is really the webpage interface, not the browser interface.
Seriously, in terms of security it doesn't make sense to ignore the federal recommentations concerning dumping IE.
But even without that, this would provide the SAME experience to those who weren't familiar with Mozilla browsers, and enchance the experience of those who were.
Libraries are nice and all, but I'd really prefer to see Mozilla loaded on school labs.
In that scenerio one of the kids will inevitably be familiar with Mozilla (since it has become at least that common) and the way kids are the entire class will know the features in a day. After that day of course, like anyone else who has used Mozilla/fire* none of them will be able to endure a browsing session with popups, spyware, browser hijacks, flash ads, and lack of tabbed browsing any longer.
Unfortunately the correct approach is to do 25% more work and design a default novice interface with a non-buried easy to find, switch to advanced interface option.
I said 25% not twice as much, because of course, almost all of the elements in the interface are shared between the two. The application still has the same overall look and feel, same colorscheme, etc. Just different menu arrangement, and different toolbars and maybe a couple added wizards.
Alot of designers solve this problem in another elegant fashion. They design their point and click interface with novices in mind, and their key commands with advanced users in mind.
Power management on windows is the evil spawn of hell. It's needed on notebooks but NEVER on desktops.
The reason you never want it on? Simple, the system fails to power the drives back up 90% of the time (except on a rare magical system that decides to work all the time).
As for powering down the screen, this usually works and recovers just fine.. but it's annoying as shit when your reading or studying a document or chart. It also saves ALOT more power to simply turn off your monitor if your going to be away from it for a length of time. A password protected blanking screensaver is a much better choice for what the parent was refering to.
As for SCSI vs IDE, you rarely use SCSI drives in desktops and notebooks? Surely your not suggesting anyone would ever consider power management on a SERVER???
I'm sure if I checked I'd find you right about the physical behavior of the drives, it's purely a software issue. I've used power management on other OS's and never had any issues with it not working or the system failing to wake up.
But again, the parent wasn't talking about systems with cron or syslog where power management would work if you turned it on. He's talking about windows, where ever laptop manufacturer spends half as much time assuring that power management works properly with their particular notebook and X version of windows as they do on designing the laptop;)
KDE isn't slow for me either, but it does reserve all my physical memory causing my system to swap.
I have a gig of ram, believe it or not, I don't feel I should ever have to swap, and greatly prefer to leave my physical ram open for other things than KDE and it's various subcomponents. Gnome doesn't do this, I'll stick with Gnome.
Essentially when you get down to the most basic level, a single cpu system can only do one thing at a time.
A dual-cpu system can do two things at a time. A quad can do 4.
Even if you have a cpu which does do more than one thing at a time, 4 of them will do 4 times as many things at a time.
Also you can have your 1 fast cpu, or you can have 4 of that same very fast cpu. Do the math, if there was a single cpu as fast as 4, they'd just release dual and quad systems utilizing that cpu?
"RISC is physically smaller? No. RISC needs a higher clock frequency because many more instructions need to be executed."
In practice, RISC chips have always been smaller, run cooler, used less power, and been faster at the same clockspeed compared to CISC chips?
Since a RISC chip executes numerous instructions simultaneously and can even perform out of order execution of instructions it eliminates that advantage of CISC chips.
The instructions also all execute in a single clock tick.
"Interix is actually a rather different thing to 'the world'. There are precisely two C/C++ compilers available for Interix: MS VC++ and GCC. Only one of the two implements the non-standard GCC extensions to C/C++ (I'll leave it to you to guess which one that is)."
Perhaps I should do a bit more reading on Interix. But your remarks on this have been particulary confusing. One minute we are talking about what is used to compile Interix, and the next is including as part of it, and the next what can be used to compile applications for it.
"That's not true."
Aside from the piece I just quoted out of the paragraph I agree with all of it. None of it contradicts anything I said? Microsoft prefers the BSD license because it allows them to steal code without contributing anything back, and profit on the work of others without any form of compensation. The GPL does not allow them to do that, which is why the BSD license is more agreeable to them than the GPL.
Yes their stance in the past was once different, condemning all open source, but I fail to see what that has to do with them not wanting the general public to know they are distributing software under the license they call cancer today.
"This is about as ludicrous as claiming people 'steal' work from those who volunteer with charities."
If Bill Gates has his meals at a soup kitchen, it's legal, but I'd call that stealing as well.
"Even now, I have never seen a single web page or document in which Microsoft openly admit SFU's userland is based on OpenBSD. I know it is because I (and others) have analysed the binaries, but Microsoft are certainly not eager to admit it."
That is why it's stealing. The BSD license requires prominent attribution, MS buries recognition as much as they possibly can.
Make no mistake though, Microsoft even has it's own open source projects on sourceforge now. I doubt recognition of work they've appropriated from others will ever be significant... but with the GPL they want more than that, they want to stomp it into the mud and spit on it.
Further if people were being "charitible" they wouldn't license their work, they would render it into the public domain.
All licenses are about repayment, the question is what form. In microsoft's case they want cold hard cash.
In the case of the GPL they want at least the possiblity of work being contributed back and the assurance the software will always be free (as in speech).
In the case of the BSD license the developers want repayment in the form of recognition.
Murder \Mur"der\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Murdered; p. pr. & vb.
n. Murdering.] [OE. mortheren, murtheren, AS. myr?rian;
akin to OHG. murdiren, Goth. ma['u]r?rjan. See Murder, n.]
1. To kill with premediated malice; to kill (a human being)
willfully, deliberately, and unlawfully. See Murder, n."
What arrogance to believe something as trivial and transient as the law could define a language, instead of it being the other way around.
According to the dictionary, it is the FACT of the act that determines a murderer, and the court only determines what it believes happened.
If someone kills with premeditation, the english language defines that person as a murderer. If the event occured, whether it can ever be proven in a court of law or not, that person is a murderer in fact. The court merely recognizes (or fails to recognize) that person a murderer in the legal sense.
In the same way, a word has come into being, that word is unix and it's definition is completely independent of any TGO certification. Whether or not the law has chosen to recognize it doesn't really matter. The law and even our government is insignificant compared to our language. Whether in france, germany, italy, the US, mexico, or what have you, it matters not, the english word unix has the same meaning, the trademark unix is not so univerisal, it may or may not even have ever existed in a given place.
"If UNIX can be claimed to have become generic, Linux has probably become even more generic."
Really I've never heard of anything but a linux-based system being called linux. Linux is a very specific tangible thing, unix is not, linux is after all an example of unix.
As for claiming to be Unix, it's not Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds but It'll do http://www.freebsd.org/.
Read the first paragraph on the page.
"If the current trademark lawsuit against Apple is resolved in Apple's favour, it will prove your view has superceded mine."
That will prove nothing but what a single man or even a group of people believe to be the truth, there is a very considerable difference between what is believed to be truth, and what IS truth.
Lets say you are lost on a desert island for 7yrs and declared legally dead. Will you then magically perish upon the holy decree by someone who doesn't have all the facts sitting on a bench? Or will you instead still breath and catch a ride on the fishing boat you see on the horizon?
And when you get back, surely you'll take your own life upon discovery of the ruling in your great reverence for the unquestionable truth as seen in a court of law.
Even if you don't believe that courts of law determine fact rather than actual occurances (or worse that what courts of law come up with usually has something to do with actual occurances). By your own admition you believe what happens in them is the best we can do to determine truth... that is an opinion much much more saddening to hear than any views you might have over a word or trademark.
With that said, it seems obvious to me you have no more wish to continue this thread than I do. Goodday to you:)
1. Efficiency. 2. Performance. 3. It's cross platform. 4. It's open source, (no don't hand me darwin, darwin is only one piece of OSX). 5. You can tune and adjust the internals as your needs dictate, in a MUCH more flexible fashion than OS X. 6. No one click install (which is a bad thing, one click installs result in configuration after the fact, that wastes time since most applications could ask the essential information during install and assume defaults for everything else).
In fact about the only thing which is TRUELY a good thing (as opposed to handholding for the ignorant) that OSX has over linux is gui performance.
With X.org new work on opengl X, the result will be that all the graphics work in the gui is offloaded to the highly optimized videocard as well. Since opengl is used for industry standard benchmarks, EVERY videocard is highly optimized for it.
Basically this will nuke the gui performance lead OSX has, in fact it'll be the other way since the linux gui is much more lightweight than the OSX eyecandy.
I'm by no means saying OSX sucks, don't get me wrong, it a FAR cry from sucking in any fashion. But there most definately ARE reasons someone would want to run linux.
"If evidence allows you to distinguish between explanations -- as with your suggested examples of where the simpler solution is false -- then Occam's Razor would not require you to keep an explanation that is demonstratably false. After all, if an explanation is wrong, then it is not a valid answer at all."
But if we pondered the problem and did not have evidence of the solution 20yrs ago, we maybe used Occams Razor to shave off the correct solution 20yrs ago and not recognize the evidence we find today as the proof of it.
What I was meaning to express, is that despite wives tales, the simpler solution is rarely the correct one in practice. At best I'd give it half, which means when we DON'T already have evidence, using Occams Razor we will throw away the correct answer (assuming one of our theories is correct) at least 50% of the time.
Occam's Razor is itself an example of the simplest solution, which is most definately NOT the correct one.
"Just as a murderer is a murderer when he kills the victim, NOT when the jury reaches a verdict.
Nonsense. Under the law, a murderer is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Under the law, a registered trademark is valid until invalidated in a court of law."
For the purpose of determining whether or not he commited the act. You see but there is this thing most of us call REALITY and then there are false premises assumed to help determine what the reality WAS, not what it will be.
A murderer who is never convicted still killed someone and is still a murderer. In most things it's fair to say there is the legal definition and then there is reality, rarely do the two have anything to do with one another.
"In misinformed usage, yes, but the fact that ignorant PC users refer to their computers as 'CPUs' doesn't mean they are in fact CPUs, and incorrect usage of 'UNIX' doesn't mean non-UNIX systems are actually UNIX."
Boy are you confused, you understand that moreso than the english language defines it's usage, it's usage defines the english language?
If enough people start to use a word to mean something other than what it presently does, then it takes on that meaning. At first we'd call it slang, if it remains slang long enough, it will be recognized as part of the english language, or it's definition changed in dictionaries.
Considering everyone but the lawyers and the extremely anal call all unix-like systems unix, always have, and that usage has in fact grown to common use among just about everyone who knows what unix is... I believe it's fairly safe to say it's slang already. Guess what... it will be a word in the english language BEFORE it's recognized as such and put in the dictionary.
Trials, recognition by standards board, etc, are reactionary, they react to things which are already true.
"MS-VC++ wouldn't use (since it runs in the Win32 subsystem)."
There are alot of compilers in the world besides GCC and MS-VC++, including numerous GCC compatible compilers.
"If you're so convinced Microsoft's decision to replace the open-source code in Interix before integrating it into Longhorn has nothing to do with legal concerns over the GPL, what do you think the reason is? Do you think it's pure marketing, i.e. being done so they don't have to say 'this product includes open-source code'? If so, why don't you suppose they mind including open-source BSD TCP/IP tools in Windows?"
Because Microsoft has always claimed that BSD-style licenses were good and GPL licenses evil. Of course the reasoning is simple, they can't modify and take advantage of GPL stuff without in turn contributing something. With the BSD style license they can wholesale steal it.
And I'm stating the simplest answer isn't more likely to be correct except in a mathmatical sense. The razor is a falsity and shouldn't be spread.
What I'm saying has absolutely nothing do with life or the lack thereof on mars. I just mean in general and anyone who mentions the razor gets this rant from me. With that said, carry on;)
Any current video card is going to perform about equally well for almost everything (including the highest end games on the market to date, the hardware is WAY ahead of the software in that area).
If your running linux or bsd or another OS which doesn't swap unless it has to, then there is a VERY big impact in memory. With a system like windows where you have swapping and vm going on your bottlenecked at the harddrive and memory performance isn't going to impact you so much.
In a linux system your cpu load is almost never all that high, the system is very efficient. Unless your doing a VERY substantial upgrade of processor it won't have alot of impact. In contrast putting in enough memory that you don't need to swap has a HUGE impact in performance, and you can definately feel+see it. Since you've eliminated the drive as a bottleneck then the memory is the bottleneck at that point, so every bit of ram performance increase results in a significant performance increase.
So in short, it's not really a windows versus linux versus bsd thing, it's a swap versus not swap thing. And windows swaps, period, no matter how much memory you have it swaps.
If you have an OS that doesn't insist on disk based memory schemes, and enough ram that you don't need those schemes, then the performance matters. I'd say (admittedly out of my arse, educated guess) that a boost in memory performance is about 50x more significant if everything is running out of ram than if some disk based scheme is happening.
"I know faster memory would help, but does it help that much when you follow the advice above?"
It matters MORE not less. When you have swapping or vm going on your bottlenecked by the harddrive. When everything is in ram your bottlenecked by the Ram.
That's why if you increase the memory in a linux or bsd system you tend to see a much more dramatic performance increase than a processor upgrade usually yields (unless it's a several generation jump, like from a p1 200 to a p4).
The processor is much faster than the memory, since you've eliminated the hdd as a bottleneck (and everything else, the memory has a direct channel to the cpu), every increase in memory speed = actual performance increase.
I'll abstain on the current issue but please stop this Occam's Razor nonsense.
It's a horrible thing to spread around, it's a completely invalid method that results in the "shaving" of solutions which may or may not be the correct ones in favor of ones which are no more likely to be correct.
The idea that a simpler answer is more correct merely because it's simpler is false. I could give you hundreds of examples where the simplest answer is NOT the correct one. In fact I could give you MORE examples where the simple answer was incorrect than the other way around.
Although useful at times, Occam's Razor overall does more harm than good and would be best forgotten.
"Nice to see you snipped the bit about The Open Group suing Apple for infringement of the UNIX trademark."
I thought another poster answered that quite nicely actually. The case is over. It is no longer in Apple's SEC filing which means that either Apple is in some VERY serious trouble with SEC or the case is over.
"The only reason this thread has continued is because you won't admit that a registered trademark is legally valid until overturned in a court of law"
That's because that statement is incorrect. A trademark is invalid upon the reason it is later overturned existing/occuring.
Just as a murderer is a murderer when he kills the victim, NOT when the jury reaches a verdict.
"Interestingly, you haven't provided any links"
I haven't said anything which required a link to back it up? This isn't a court of law, this is a news forum on which I share my opinions with you out of the kindness of my heart. It's not a court of law, and it's not a slashdot STORY posting. Including redundant links doesn't score you any points.
The open group filing suit against Apple is not a conviction and is meaningless.
I've never said the open group didnt have a registered trademark on the word unix. I said that trademark is of questionable validity and that even if it weren't, the open group certification is not what determines whether a system is unix in the common english usage of the word.
"Do you honestly think that (a) using a compiler toolchain to build the userland for an operating environemnt (Interix), and (b) shipping that toolchain in binary form as part of the operating environment is the same thing as dumping a few random binaries onto the same CD?"
If they actually build the environment with GCC yes it's something different, but no it's no less of a stretch. I honestly wouldn't know what they compiled it with, and I doubt you can be sure either. The only thing I can be sure of is they are DISTRIBUTING GCC alongside other tools (which could be compiled with a number of compilers).
But as I said, claiming that an application is derivative work of the compiler is ridiculous. A compiler does nothing more than translate sourcecode into object code. If that qualifies as a derivative of the compiler than your speech becomes a derivative of your translators speech if you go to a foreign country. And of course if you run MS Windows in vmware it then becomes a derivative of vmware.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly wasn't talking about intentionally changing the setup.
If your changing the system intentionally rather than because it doesn't function properly, that is a completely new investment altogether and NOT part your TCO calculations.
True true, but then the open source ideology gets the job done better than the closed source ideology.
Oh it might not in this or that area at the moment, but history has proven, and will inevitably continue to prove for the foreseeable future, that open source will get to this or that area sooner or later.
Open source doesn't have to release in time to make it's quarterly. It doesn't have to compete, it can lag behind something else today and spend the next 5 or 10 or 20yrs catching up other areas before getting around to it. Open source does not and cannot die. There really is no debating this.
Where the community concentrates their efforts and have been given the time to show the fruits of their labor no commercial entity even begins to compare. More and more we will see projects mature and close source companies ousted. After all, there is no way a commercial entity could compete with the much more yet, yet infinately more stable and secure development which goes hand and hand with open source.
Not really, samba actually does file and print using their own protocols.
It's faster and scales better than the Microsoft implementations by all accounts.
Alot of the theories of samba requiring so much more administration assume dancing through firehoops to get directory services.
First directory services are severly overrated, and second their only benefit is reduced administration. If you must roll your own dancing through firehoops solution to get them, they aren't worth it. And since alot of these companies are coming from nt 4 to begin with, it's just out and out ridiculous.
Even without samba though, cups printing is equally easy, and from a technical standpoint, far superior to anything MS offers. So we are really talking about filesharing.
Either way though, novell will be resolving the directory services issue and extra overhead required to set everything up to begin with. So once it enters the market, there will be a much more tangible initial cost savings as well as the long term admin costs (or lack thereof).
True enough, but there are no license costs and using Linux and/or BSD requires less of ones time?
I don't mean at the outset, in fact a linux solution can take MORE time to setup initially. But since it is generally setup and never touched again that is the only time investment.
As opposed to windows, which requires at least a few minutes of your time everyday, and another dose of an hour or two about once a month. It adds up to more than the extra hour spent configuring linux fairly quickly.
If you do NOT know the advantages there really isn't any difference between the two?
Especially on a kiosk where there is only one webpage they can view? The interface is really the webpage interface, not the browser interface.
Seriously, in terms of security it doesn't make sense to ignore the federal recommentations concerning dumping IE.
But even without that, this would provide the SAME experience to those who weren't familiar with Mozilla browsers, and enchance the experience of those who were.
Libraries are nice and all, but I'd really prefer to see Mozilla loaded on school labs.
In that scenerio one of the kids will inevitably be familiar with Mozilla (since it has become at least that common) and the way kids are the entire class will know the features in a day. After that day of course, like anyone else who has used Mozilla/fire* none of them will be able to endure a browsing session with popups, spyware, browser hijacks, flash ads, and lack of tabbed browsing any longer.
Unfortunately the correct approach is to do 25% more work and design a default novice interface with a non-buried easy to find, switch to advanced interface option.
I said 25% not twice as much, because of course, almost all of the elements in the interface are shared between the two. The application still has the same overall look and feel, same colorscheme, etc. Just different menu arrangement, and different toolbars and maybe a couple added wizards.
Alot of designers solve this problem in another elegant fashion. They design their point and click interface with novices in mind, and their key commands with advanced users in mind.
Power management on windows is the evil spawn of hell. It's needed on notebooks but NEVER on desktops.
;)
The reason you never want it on? Simple, the system fails to power the drives back up 90% of the time (except on a rare magical system that decides to work all the time).
As for powering down the screen, this usually works and recovers just fine.. but it's annoying as shit when your reading or studying a document or chart. It also saves ALOT more power to simply turn off your monitor if your going to be away from it for a length of time. A password protected blanking screensaver is a much better choice for what the parent was refering to.
As for SCSI vs IDE, you rarely use SCSI drives in desktops and notebooks? Surely your not suggesting anyone would ever consider power management on a SERVER???
I'm sure if I checked I'd find you right about the physical behavior of the drives, it's purely a software issue. I've used power management on other OS's and never had any issues with it not working or the system failing to wake up.
But again, the parent wasn't talking about systems with cron or syslog where power management would work if you turned it on. He's talking about windows, where ever laptop manufacturer spends half as much time assuring that power management works properly with their particular notebook and X version of windows as they do on designing the laptop
Possibly because text file editing is extremely easy?
KDE isn't slow for me either, but it does reserve all my physical memory causing my system to swap.
I have a gig of ram, believe it or not, I don't feel I should ever have to swap, and greatly prefer to leave my physical ram open for other things than KDE and it's various subcomponents. Gnome doesn't do this, I'll stick with Gnome.
Not really.
Essentially when you get down to the most basic level, a single cpu system can only do one thing at a time.
A dual-cpu system can do two things at a time. A quad can do 4.
Even if you have a cpu which does do more than one thing at a time, 4 of them will do 4 times as many things at a time.
Also you can have your 1 fast cpu, or you can have 4 of that same very fast cpu. Do the math, if there was a single cpu as fast as 4, they'd just release dual and quad systems utilizing that cpu?
If they sell you a copy, they've then distributed it and the gpl requires them to license those changes to you under the gpl.
Any SGI customer can then contribute the changes back to the kernel long before a year is up.
wrong pattern it goes like this
a de
24hrs/day
7days/week
365days/yr
3652days/dec
We just usually aren't willing to commit to the decade thing.
"RISC is physically smaller? No. RISC needs a higher clock frequency because many more instructions need to be executed."
In practice, RISC chips have always been smaller, run cooler, used less power, and been faster at the same clockspeed compared to CISC chips?
Since a RISC chip executes numerous instructions simultaneously and can even perform out of order execution of instructions it eliminates that advantage of CISC chips.
The instructions also all execute in a single clock tick.
"Interix is actually a rather different thing to 'the world'. There are precisely two C/C++ compilers available for Interix: MS VC++ and GCC. Only one of the two implements the non-standard GCC extensions to C/C++ (I'll leave it to you to guess which one that is)."
Perhaps I should do a bit more reading on Interix. But your remarks on this have been particulary confusing. One minute we are talking about what is used to compile Interix, and the next is including as part of it, and the next what can be used to compile applications for it.
"That's not true."
Aside from the piece I just quoted out of the paragraph I agree with all of it. None of it contradicts anything I said? Microsoft prefers the BSD license because it allows them to steal code without contributing anything back, and profit on the work of others without any form of compensation. The GPL does not allow them to do that, which is why the BSD license is more agreeable to them than the GPL.
Yes their stance in the past was once different, condemning all open source, but I fail to see what that has to do with them not wanting the general public to know they are distributing software under the license they call cancer today.
"This is about as ludicrous as claiming people 'steal' work from those who volunteer with charities."
If Bill Gates has his meals at a soup kitchen, it's legal, but I'd call that stealing as well.
"Even now, I have never seen a single web page or document in which Microsoft openly admit SFU's userland is based on OpenBSD. I know it is because I (and others) have analysed the binaries, but Microsoft are certainly not eager to admit it."
That is why it's stealing. The BSD license requires prominent attribution, MS buries recognition as much as they possibly can.
Make no mistake though, Microsoft even has it's own open source projects on sourceforge now. I doubt recognition of work they've appropriated from others will ever be significant... but with the GPL they want more than that, they want to stomp it into the mud and spit on it.
Further if people were being "charitible" they wouldn't license their work, they would render it into the public domain.
All licenses are about repayment, the question is what form. In microsoft's case they want cold hard cash.
In the case of the GPL they want at least the possiblity of work being contributed back and the assurance the software will always be free (as in speech).
In the case of the BSD license the developers want repayment in the form of recognition.
"Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
:)
Murder \Mur"der\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Murdered; p. pr. & vb.
n. Murdering.] [OE. mortheren, murtheren, AS. myr?rian;
akin to OHG. murdiren, Goth. ma['u]r?rjan. See Murder, n.]
1. To kill with premediated malice; to kill (a human being)
willfully, deliberately, and unlawfully. See Murder, n."
What arrogance to believe something as trivial and transient as the law could define a language, instead of it being the other way around.
According to the dictionary, it is the FACT of the act that determines a murderer, and the court only determines what it believes happened.
If someone kills with premeditation, the english language defines that person as a murderer. If the event occured, whether it can ever be proven in a court of law or not, that person is a murderer in fact. The court merely recognizes (or fails to recognize) that person a murderer in the legal sense.
In the same way, a word has come into being, that word is unix and it's definition is completely independent of any TGO certification. Whether or not the law has chosen to recognize it doesn't really matter. The law and even our government is insignificant compared to our language. Whether in france, germany, italy, the US, mexico, or what have you, it matters not, the english word unix has the same meaning, the trademark unix is not so univerisal, it may or may not even have ever existed in a given place.
"If UNIX can be claimed to have become generic, Linux has probably become even more generic."
Really I've never heard of anything but a linux-based system being called linux. Linux is a very specific tangible thing, unix is not, linux is after all an example of unix.
As for claiming to be Unix, it's not Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds but It'll do http://www.freebsd.org/.
Read the first paragraph on the page.
"If the current trademark lawsuit against Apple is resolved in Apple's favour, it will prove your view has superceded mine."
That will prove nothing but what a single man or even a group of people believe to be the truth, there is a very considerable difference between what is believed to be truth, and what IS truth.
Lets say you are lost on a desert island for 7yrs and declared legally dead. Will you then magically perish upon the holy decree by someone who doesn't have all the facts sitting on a bench? Or will you instead still breath and catch a ride on the fishing boat you see on the horizon?
And when you get back, surely you'll take your own life upon discovery of the ruling in your great reverence for the unquestionable truth as seen in a court of law.
Even if you don't believe that courts of law determine fact rather than actual occurances (or worse that what courts of law come up with usually has something to do with actual occurances). By your own admition you believe what happens in them is the best we can do to determine truth... that is an opinion much much more saddening to hear than any views you might have over a word or trademark.
With that said, it seems obvious to me you have no more wish to continue this thread than I do. Goodday to you
1. Efficiency.
2. Performance.
3. It's cross platform.
4. It's open source, (no don't hand me darwin, darwin is only one piece of OSX).
5. You can tune and adjust the internals as your needs dictate, in a MUCH more flexible fashion than OS X.
6. No one click install (which is a bad thing, one click installs result in configuration after the fact, that wastes time since most applications could ask the essential information during install and assume defaults for everything else).
In fact about the only thing which is TRUELY a good thing (as opposed to handholding for the ignorant) that OSX has over linux is gui performance.
With X.org new work on opengl X, the result will be that all the graphics work in the gui is offloaded to the highly optimized videocard as well. Since opengl is used for industry standard benchmarks, EVERY videocard is highly optimized for it.
Basically this will nuke the gui performance lead OSX has, in fact it'll be the other way since the linux gui is much more lightweight than the OSX eyecandy.
I'm by no means saying OSX sucks, don't get me wrong, it a FAR cry from sucking in any fashion. But there most definately ARE reasons someone would want to run linux.
"If evidence allows you to distinguish between explanations -- as with your suggested examples of where the simpler solution is false -- then Occam's Razor would not require you to keep an explanation that is demonstratably false. After all, if an explanation is wrong, then it is not a valid answer at all."
But if we pondered the problem and did not have evidence of the solution 20yrs ago, we maybe used Occams Razor to shave off the correct solution 20yrs ago and not recognize the evidence we find today as the proof of it.
What I was meaning to express, is that despite wives tales, the simpler solution is rarely the correct one in practice. At best I'd give it half, which means when we DON'T already have evidence, using Occams Razor we will throw away the correct answer (assuming one of our theories is correct) at least 50% of the time.
Occam's Razor is itself an example of the simplest solution, which is most definately NOT the correct one.
"Just as a murderer is a murderer when he kills the victim, NOT when the jury reaches a verdict.
Nonsense. Under the law, a murderer is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Under the law, a registered trademark is valid until invalidated in a court of law."
For the purpose of determining whether or not he commited the act. You see but there is this thing most of us call REALITY and then there are false premises assumed to help determine what the reality WAS, not what it will be.
A murderer who is never convicted still killed someone and is still a murderer. In most things it's fair to say there is the legal definition and then there is reality, rarely do the two have anything to do with one another.
"In misinformed usage, yes, but the fact that ignorant PC users refer to their computers as 'CPUs' doesn't mean they are in fact CPUs, and incorrect usage of 'UNIX' doesn't mean non-UNIX systems are actually UNIX."
Boy are you confused, you understand that moreso than the english language defines it's usage, it's usage defines the english language?
If enough people start to use a word to mean something other than what it presently does, then it takes on that meaning. At first we'd call it slang, if it remains slang long enough, it will be recognized as part of the english language, or it's definition changed in dictionaries.
Considering everyone but the lawyers and the extremely anal call all unix-like systems unix, always have, and that usage has in fact grown to common use among just about everyone who knows what unix is... I believe it's fairly safe to say it's slang already. Guess what... it will be a word in the english language BEFORE it's recognized as such and put in the dictionary.
Trials, recognition by standards board, etc, are reactionary, they react to things which are already true.
"MS-VC++ wouldn't use (since it runs in the Win32 subsystem)."
There are alot of compilers in the world besides GCC and MS-VC++, including numerous GCC compatible compilers.
"If you're so convinced Microsoft's decision to replace the open-source code in Interix before integrating it into Longhorn has nothing to do with legal concerns over the GPL, what do you think the reason is? Do you think it's pure marketing, i.e. being done so they don't have to say 'this product includes open-source code'? If so, why don't you suppose they mind including open-source BSD TCP/IP tools in Windows?"
Because Microsoft has always claimed that BSD-style licenses were good and GPL licenses evil. Of course the reasoning is simple, they can't modify and take advantage of GPL stuff without in turn contributing something. With the BSD style license they can wholesale steal it.
And I'm stating the simplest answer isn't more likely to be correct except in a mathmatical sense. The razor is a falsity and shouldn't be spread.
;)
What I'm saying has absolutely nothing do with life or the lack thereof on mars. I just mean in general and anyone who mentions the razor gets this rant from me. With that said, carry on
Any current video card is going to perform about equally well for almost everything (including the highest end games on the market to date, the hardware is WAY ahead of the software in that area).
If your running linux or bsd or another OS which doesn't swap unless it has to, then there is a VERY big impact in memory. With a system like windows where you have swapping and vm going on your bottlenecked at the harddrive and memory performance isn't going to impact you so much.
In a linux system your cpu load is almost never all that high, the system is very efficient. Unless your doing a VERY substantial upgrade of processor it won't have alot of impact. In contrast putting in enough memory that you don't need to swap has a HUGE impact in performance, and you can definately feel+see it. Since you've eliminated the drive as a bottleneck then the memory is the bottleneck at that point, so every bit of ram performance increase results in a significant performance increase.
So in short, it's not really a windows versus linux versus bsd thing, it's a swap versus not swap thing. And windows swaps, period, no matter how much memory you have it swaps.
If you have an OS that doesn't insist on disk based memory schemes, and enough ram that you don't need those schemes, then the performance matters. I'd say (admittedly out of my arse, educated guess) that a boost in memory performance is about 50x more significant if everything is running out of ram than if some disk based scheme is happening.
"I know faster memory would help, but does it help that much when you follow the advice above?"
It matters MORE not less. When you have swapping or vm going on your bottlenecked by the harddrive. When everything is in ram your bottlenecked by the Ram.
That's why if you increase the memory in a linux or bsd system you tend to see a much more dramatic performance increase than a processor upgrade usually yields (unless it's a several generation jump, like from a p1 200 to a p4).
The processor is much faster than the memory, since you've eliminated the hdd as a bottleneck (and everything else, the memory has a direct channel to the cpu), every increase in memory speed = actual performance increase.
'"Occam's Razor compatable" explanations.'
I'll abstain on the current issue but please stop this Occam's Razor nonsense.
It's a horrible thing to spread around, it's a completely invalid method that results in the "shaving" of solutions which may or may not be the correct ones in favor of ones which are no more likely to be correct.
The idea that a simpler answer is more correct merely because it's simpler is false. I could give you hundreds of examples where the simplest answer is NOT the correct one. In fact I could give you MORE examples where the simple answer was incorrect than the other way around.
Although useful at times, Occam's Razor overall does more harm than good and would be best forgotten.
Sorry jumped the gun on submitting.
"Nice to see you snipped the bit about The Open Group suing Apple for infringement of the UNIX trademark."
I thought another poster answered that quite nicely actually. The case is over. It is no longer in Apple's SEC filing which means that either Apple is in some VERY serious trouble with SEC or the case is over.
"The only reason this thread has continued is because you won't admit that a registered trademark is legally valid until overturned in a court of law"
That's because that statement is incorrect. A trademark is invalid upon the reason it is later overturned existing/occuring.
Just as a murderer is a murderer when he kills the victim, NOT when the jury reaches a verdict.
"Interestingly, you haven't provided any links"
I haven't said anything which required a link to back it up? This isn't a court of law, this is a news forum on which I share my opinions with you out of the kindness of my heart. It's not a court of law, and it's not a slashdot STORY posting. Including redundant links doesn't score you any points.
The open group filing suit against Apple is not a conviction and is meaningless.
I've never said the open group didnt have a registered trademark on the word unix. I said that trademark is of questionable validity and that even if it weren't, the open group certification is not what determines whether a system is unix in the common english usage of the word.
"Do you honestly think that (a) using a compiler toolchain to build the userland for an operating environemnt (Interix), and (b) shipping that toolchain in binary form as part of the operating environment is the same thing as dumping a few random binaries onto the same CD?"
If they actually build the environment with GCC yes it's something different, but no it's no less of a stretch. I honestly wouldn't know what they compiled it with, and I doubt you can be sure either. The only thing I can be sure of is they are DISTRIBUTING GCC alongside other tools (which could be compiled with a number of compilers).
But as I said, claiming that an application is derivative work of the compiler is ridiculous. A compiler does nothing more than translate sourcecode into object code. If that qualifies as a derivative of the compiler than your speech becomes a derivative of your translators speech if you go to a foreign country. And of course if you run MS Windows in vmware it then becomes a derivative of vmware.