And getting back on topic...this sounds very similar to pine. Debian you will notice doesn't distribute pine because pine doesn't allow binaries built from modified source to be distributed. So debian has no license... so debian obeyed the licence.
Debian could do what they do with qmail, just distribute a qmail-src package.
I don't think the issue is that PostgreSQL will crunch data as well as Oracle. It's just that PostgreSQL has always had an undeserved reputation as "the database to use when you can't afford a REAL database", when actually it's a very robust and secure system that can compete quite well with commercial systems.
I'd really like to see some serious tests done with PostgreSQL. Database systems, especially Oracle, can be an expensive part of a datacenter. Considering that with Linux/PostgreSQL your only cost is hardware/support, it may very well scale more cost effectively than Oracle.
There's currently way too much marketing and FUD to get a real idea how these systems compare though.
I don't need to ride one to understand physics. Energy = mass x speed. A 70 lb segway with 200 lbs of passenger going 10mph just doesn't magically and instantly dissipate all it's into energy into nothing when it slams into an object.
1) NWN WAS cross platform from the beginning. I'm not sure where it got hung up, but most of the linux code was in there from the start. Same with the Mac code.
While it's pretty obvious a good solid core of NWN was cross platform, you can't really say the entire game was. For instance you guys were re-writting the audio engine until you found out there was a Linux version of Miles.
Also the movie format you're using still isn't portable.
From an outside perspective seeing BioWare release NWN Linux looks very much like you're going through a learning experience, figuring out what works and what doesn't. Dispite the odd gripes you'll hear, most of us Linux geeks are extremely pleased BioWare is making the effort and our biggest hope is that you take what you've learned in porting NWN and apply it to future BioWare titles so Linux support isn't such a drain on your programmers.
Regarding their comments about my public speaking prowess - both Michael and I were on NPR the other day, and the broadcast archive is at sciencefriday.com . Judge for yourself.
If they were servers, just convert them over slowly as part of an upgrade process.
If they're desktop boxes, you just flash new hard drive images onto them. Your users wouldn't know the difference. If you have power users with non-imagable machines, you just upgrade them later when you're doing some other upgrade on their box(ie, when Red Hat goes out of date and you need to upgrade anyway).
There are very very few differences between Linux distributions.
Red Hat has always been about selling a brand, not a product. I remember back in the mid 90's Bob Young talked about doing just that.
He compared his business plan to what Heinz ketchup and Harley Davidson do. All the japs make a better and cheaper motorcycle, but people flock to the Harley Davidson "experience". Ketchup is ketchup is ketchup, but people pay more for Heinz because they recognize the brand name.
I think that's why you see Red Hat pushing it's own cert programs, training, custom programming and what not.
Mr. Dreifach said the decision had implications beyond Network Associates. "These types of clauses are not uncommon," he said. The decision "raises the issue of whether these types of clauses -- whether they restrict use, resale or the right to criticize -- are enforceable," he added.
A lot EULA's have stupid and asinine clauses in them and they're getting worse every year. I think this ruling sets a precident that there are restrictions to how far EULA's can go in limiting the rights of the customer.
You have to show proof that you actively defend your trademark. Proof like this is exactly the sort of lawyer letter they sent out. In a later trademark case they can use this letter to show the defend the trademark.
But the real problem is that people today are so law scared they panic when anything comes at them from a lawyer.
Is getting a letter from a law firm saying, "Our client asks that you please stop doing X" really any different than the company themselves asking you not do X?
With the lawyers at least the letter will be worded in a way as to not be ambigious.
I'm questioning the chance OSS has without making much money off a product (mandrake) and and how it kills its market for closed source apps (Loki)
The problem isn't OSS, it's bad business models. We had a TON of those in the dot com era, people throwing money at technology as if it'd just magically create profit.
A lot of OSS businesses got their start in this era, so it's natural to see a good deal of them die off horribly.
Loki died, and yet http://www.linuxgamepublishing.com/ lives on. Mandrake is in trouble, yet Red Hat seems to be doing fine.
Also TrollTech seems to be doing okay, MySQL has been chugging along, the PHP folks started up Zend and are doing alright... probably all because they have sound business models or just happened to find the right market.
What is it, 1 out of 10 businesses actually succeed? A few OSS companies folding doesn't reflect on OSS has a whole.
If you needed a big business distro, why on earth would you be looking into Mandrake anyway?
What can you show them? Try Red Hat which caters specificially to business needs and has one of the best cert programs in the industry: http://www.redhat.com/training/rhce/courses/
As for RHAT's IPO, everyone tanked when the dot com bubble burst. Hell, I think Red Hat's stock is about twice the value of Sun's right now.
Package revision numbers should be incremented by Gentoo Linux developers when the ebuild has changed to the point where users would want to upgrade. Typically, this is the case when fixes are made to an ebuild that affect the resultant installed files, but the ebuild uses the same source tarball as the previous release. If you make an internal, stylistic change to the ebuild that does not change any of the installed files, then there is no need to bump the revision number. Likewise, if you fix a compilation problem in the ebuild that was affecting some users, there is no need to bump the revision number, since those for whom it worked perfectly would see no benefit in installing a new revision, and those who experienced the problem do not have the package installed (since compilation failed) and thus have no need for the new revision number to force an upgrade.
Gentoo bumps ebuild versions, just not for style changes.
I think what it is is that programming requires a sort of compulsive nature not often seen in women. It's sorta like model train sets. You can see a man spend months building a perfect little model train set, hovering over all the small little details like the trees and buildings trying to make it just right, but it's not something you'd really see a woman do.
It's that same sort of compulsive nature that makes programming appealing. It's not that you'd never see that trait in a woman, it's just far far more common in men.
His point, that you missed, was that taking quotes out of context can be used to make anyone look like you want them to, or say anything you want them to, and is the worst form of journalism.
1> With proprietary software you can only get real support from the company that made it. If MS doesn't want to fix a bug in Windows that's killing your business, tough shit, you're screwed.
2> With OSS any professional coders/firms can offer support, because they have source code access and the rights to modify it.
It's about being free from a vendor tie-in, which is a good thing because vendors are unrealiable. Even if your vendor is good today, it can turn to crap tomorrow.
I do this with PHP all the time. I write up some code and certain classes a few levels down don't call or work like I expected, so I toss in some print "made is this far" lines here and there and I can see where it's making it or not making it.
Then I use prints to inspect values to see where I'm messing something up.
It's worked for 5 years, though I supposed I should use some sort of "real" debugger or something.
Yes, freedoms are granted by the government. Your own argument confirms it - the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are there specifically to give them to the citizenry.
That's incorrect. The Bill of Rights doesn't grant any rights, it recognizes in writing rights that are given to each human being by their creator.
The US Government doesn't give me the right to free speach, I was born with it.
But that doesn't mean those rights can't be taken away. Society empowers the government with the ability to remove our "God given" rights in certain circumstances, for the benefit of society.
You have it backwards. Governments don't give rights, they take them away. But without that lack of restrictions, we'd have anarchy.
They should name this the MTV Effect or something.
1> Start something aimed at a specific small market. 2> Get a taste for money. 3> Ignore why you started in the first place and do what everyone else is doing(or actually, do worse stuff to just make a quick buck).
Personally my "Megway" is a Suzukiway. It goes 130 mph, costs about as much as a segway and it's just as inconvenient in the rain and can't carry groceries either.
Slashdot Mirror
And getting back on topic...this sounds very similar to pine. Debian you will notice doesn't distribute pine because pine doesn't allow binaries built from modified source to be distributed. So debian has no license... so debian obeyed the licence.
Debian could do what they do with qmail, just distribute a qmail-src package.
I don't think the issue is that PostgreSQL will crunch data as well as Oracle. It's just that PostgreSQL has always had an undeserved reputation as "the database to use when you can't afford a REAL database", when actually it's a very robust and secure system that can compete quite well with commercial systems.
I'd really like to see some serious tests done with PostgreSQL. Database systems, especially Oracle, can be an expensive part of a datacenter. Considering that with Linux/PostgreSQL your only cost is hardware/support, it may very well scale more cost effectively than Oracle.
There's currently way too much marketing and FUD to get a real idea how these systems compare though.
I don't need to ride one to understand physics. Energy = mass x speed. A 70 lb segway with 200 lbs of passenger going 10mph just doesn't magically and instantly dissipate all it's into energy into nothing when it slams into an object.
Wow, so we get to pay 200 bucks for equipment and 10 bucks a month to listen to radio that has more channels?
Too bad some bright guy can't think of a way to use the internet to do the same thing for free.
1) NWN WAS cross platform from the beginning. I'm not sure where it got hung up, but most of the linux code was in there from the start. Same with the Mac code.
While it's pretty obvious a good solid core of NWN was cross platform, you can't really say the entire game was. For instance you guys were re-writting the audio engine until you found out there was a Linux version of Miles.
Also the movie format you're using still isn't portable.
From an outside perspective seeing BioWare release NWN Linux looks very much like you're going through a learning experience, figuring out what works and what doesn't. Dispite the odd gripes you'll hear, most of us Linux geeks are extremely pleased BioWare is making the effort and our biggest hope is that you take what you've learned in porting NWN and apply it to future BioWare titles so Linux support isn't such a drain on your programmers.
Regarding their comments about my public speaking prowess - both Michael and I were on NPR the other day, and the broadcast archive is at sciencefriday.com . Judge for yourself.
r 1_ 011703.html
Link for those interested:
http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2003/Jan/hou
It would be fairly trivial.
If they were servers, just convert them over slowly as part of an upgrade process.
If they're desktop boxes, you just flash new hard drive images onto them. Your users wouldn't know the difference. If you have power users with non-imagable machines, you just upgrade them later when you're doing some other upgrade on their box(ie, when Red Hat goes out of date and you need to upgrade anyway).
There are very very few differences between Linux distributions.
Red Hat has always been about selling a brand, not a product. I remember back in the mid 90's Bob Young talked about doing just that.
He compared his business plan to what Heinz ketchup and Harley Davidson do. All the japs make a better and cheaper motorcycle, but people flock to the Harley Davidson "experience". Ketchup is ketchup is ketchup, but people pay more for Heinz because they recognize the brand name.
I think that's why you see Red Hat pushing it's own cert programs, training, custom programming and what not.
Mr. Dreifach said the decision had implications beyond Network Associates. "These types of clauses are not uncommon," he said. The decision "raises the issue of whether these types of clauses -- whether they restrict use, resale or the right to criticize -- are enforceable," he added.
A lot EULA's have stupid and asinine clauses in them and they're getting worse every year. I think this ruling sets a precident that there are restrictions to how far EULA's can go in limiting the rights of the customer.
You have to show proof that you actively defend your trademark. Proof like this is exactly the sort of lawyer letter they sent out. In a later trademark case they can use this letter to show the defend the trademark.
But the real problem is that people today are so law scared they panic when anything comes at them from a lawyer.
Is getting a letter from a law firm saying, "Our client asks that you please stop doing X" really any different than the company themselves asking you not do X?
With the lawyers at least the letter will be worded in a way as to not be ambigious.
I'm questioning the chance OSS has without making much money off a product (mandrake) and and how it kills its market for closed source apps (Loki)
The problem isn't OSS, it's bad business models. We had a TON of those in the dot com era, people throwing money at technology as if it'd just magically create profit.
A lot of OSS businesses got their start in this era, so it's natural to see a good deal of them die off horribly.
Loki died, and yet http://www.linuxgamepublishing.com/ lives on.
Mandrake is in trouble, yet Red Hat seems to be doing fine.
Also TrollTech seems to be doing okay, MySQL has been chugging along, the PHP folks started up Zend and are doing alright... probably all because they have sound business models or just happened to find the right market.
What is it, 1 out of 10 businesses actually succeed? A few OSS companies folding doesn't reflect on OSS has a whole.
If you needed a big business distro, why on earth would you be looking into Mandrake anyway?
What can you show them? Try Red Hat which caters specificially to business needs and has one of the best cert programs in the industry: http://www.redhat.com/training/rhce/courses/
As for RHAT's IPO, everyone tanked when the dot com bubble burst. Hell, I think Red Hat's stock is about twice the value of Sun's right now.
Here's Gentoo's exact policy on this:
Package revision numbers should be incremented by Gentoo Linux developers when the ebuild has changed to the point where users would want to upgrade. Typically, this is the case when fixes are made to an ebuild that affect the resultant installed files, but the ebuild uses the same source tarball as the previous release. If you make an internal, stylistic change to the ebuild that does not change any of the installed files, then there is no need to bump the revision number. Likewise, if you fix a compilation problem in the ebuild that was affecting some users, there is no need to bump the revision number, since those for whom it worked perfectly would see no benefit in installing a new revision, and those who experienced the problem do not have the package installed (since compilation failed) and thus have no need for the new revision number to force an upgrade.
Gentoo bumps ebuild versions, just not for style changes.
I think what it is is that programming requires a sort of compulsive nature not often seen in women. It's sorta like model train sets. You can see a man spend months building a perfect little model train set, hovering over all the small little details like the trees and buildings trying to make it just right, but it's not something you'd really see a woman do.
It's that same sort of compulsive nature that makes programming appealing. It's not that you'd never see that trait in a woman, it's just far far more common in men.
His point, that you missed, was that taking quotes out of context can be used to make anyone look like you want them to, or say anything you want them to, and is the worst form of journalism.
1> With proprietary software you can only get real support from the company that made it. If MS doesn't want to fix a bug in Windows that's killing your business, tough shit, you're screwed.
2> With OSS any professional coders/firms can offer support, because they have source code access and the rights to modify it.
It's about being free from a vendor tie-in, which is a good thing because vendors are unrealiable. Even if your vendor is good today, it can turn to crap tomorrow.
"Somebody could develop standards and implementations for some kind of where-am-I beacon"
Hello emergency? I live at xxx xxx xxx...
People did that for 60+ years and it seemed to work okay.
I do this with PHP all the time. I write up some code and certain classes a few levels down don't call or work like I expected, so I toss in some print "made is this far" lines here and there and I can see where it's making it or not making it.
Then I use prints to inspect values to see where I'm messing something up.
It's worked for 5 years, though I supposed I should use some sort of "real" debugger or something.
I'm an American and it's tacky as hell.
Yes, freedoms are granted by the government. Your own argument confirms it - the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are there specifically to give them to the citizenry.
That's incorrect. The Bill of Rights doesn't grant any rights, it recognizes in writing rights that are given to each human being by their creator.
The US Government doesn't give me the right to free speach, I was born with it.
But that doesn't mean those rights can't be taken away. Society empowers the government with the ability to remove our "God given" rights in certain circumstances, for the benefit of society.
You have it backwards. Governments don't give rights, they take them away. But without that lack of restrictions, we'd have anarchy.
They should name this the MTV Effect or something.
1> Start something aimed at a specific small market.
2> Get a taste for money.
3> Ignore why you started in the first place and do what everyone else is doing(or actually, do worse stuff to just make a quick buck).
Every episode was like the characters had taken LSD.
Baen is another publisher that has put books out for free on the internet for downloading.
http://www.baen.com/library/
Baen books has supported free novels for a while now, see http://www.baen.com/library/
Their idea is that the more people read "free" novels, the more likely they are to purchase novels from the same author in the future.
Dude that's priceless.
Personally my "Megway" is a Suzukiway. It goes 130 mph, costs about as much as a segway and it's just as inconvenient in the rain and can't carry groceries either.