From the Kernel Changes part of the release notes:
Support for 80386 processors (the I386_CPU kernel configuration option) has been removed. Users running this class of CPU should use FreeBSD 5.X or earlier.
I sorta find that astounding (not that I have a 386 around myself). Oh well, the world has moved on.
I think the world's one and only existant SCO Linux license might be worth something as a novelty/history-of-computer item on ebay. So maybe the license fee (what was it? like $700?) would be an investment.
Monopoly Subsidized Bell Labs
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
For all the talk about the evil monopoly, the fact is that the confortable non-competative enviroment of the monopoly allowed AT&T to subsidize all the cool research at Bell Labs. Now-a-days, the ultra-competitve, cost-cutting, outsourcing-to-save-a-dime way of business would never tolerate a "dead-weight" research division that wasn't turning a quick direct profit. The modern business model of pursuit of a quick profit and "enhancing shareholder value" means that the kind of long term research done by Bell Labs is a thing of the distant past.
When was the last time that Lucent (the sucessor to Bell Labs) invented anything that was totally groundbreaking like the transitor or UNIX? Never. They are too busy trying to stay afloat (by selling switches and equipment) to fund any significant research.
I wouldn't expect SBC/AT&T to be any different. Either they will only think about quick profits -OR- they will claim (perhaps trufully) that they don't have the cashflow to fund extra research. From SBC Labs' website that you linked to, it looks like their proudest accomplishment was developing a DSL self-install kit. Whoopie.
A Patent is a grant of property from the Sovereign (i.e. the legal state, whether that be the "People" or the "Crown" or the "Republic"). Most people define "property" as having a set of legal (usually exclusive) rights to possess, enjoy, and dispose of some thing. All property flows from the Sovereign. The Sovereign either grants it directly (as in a patent for land or intellectual property) or he recognizes it through enacting laws. The "Real" in real estate does not mean true, but litteraly "Royal". You may like to think that its *your* property because of some moral reason (like you earned it or made it yourself), but legally it is only yours because the Sovereign says so through his laws.
Since property and patents are at the pleasure of the Sovereign, the Sovereign is free to revoke it at any time. This is called escheat. In fact, if you die without an heir, your property automatically escheats to the Sovereign.
So, a Soveriegn of a State, can legally revoke any patent of his own granting at any time. Other than because of a treaty obligation, a Sovereign State need not recognize or allow a Patent granted by another state.
Here in the US, our Founders were well aware (and sometimes the personal victims) of the abuses and escheats at the hands of the British Sovereign. So all the above was modified by our constitution which says that property may not be seized except with "due process of law". The Congress has also set up horrible "patent and copyright" laws. Obviously, Taiwan has different laws.
I completely agree with you that a good scientist knows that new theories "supplant older theories as newer, better, more accurate observations are made". Good science always accepts a certain healthly level of uncertainty and provisionalness. However, there are a lot people who forget that and then go on to make far reaching claims and absolute conclusions based on "scientific" computer models. I cringe when somebody with an agenda (political, scientific, social) says "We *must* immediately do $action because scientists have proven $dramatic_result by conducting $flawed_computer_model"
My illustrative point about Global Warming is that when the hypothosis was formed about 10-15 years ago, the computer models gave certain predictions of where global temperatures would be now. Those predictions were wildly inaccurate. Granted, newer models used today are more complex and contain more data than the old models, but given the long lead time of observations, we can have no more confidence in their accurancy than the ten year old models. These models haven't even risen to the level of "best-fit" for accurately describing or predicting phenomena. Yet, you have people running around spouting off about such-and-such computer models predicts so-and-so. Because the models are unproven (and indeed, the immediate anticedants that they modify were shown to be wildly wrong) their trust of the anthropogenic warming models equates to little more than "faith" under color of science.
The Antikythera device is based on the theory of Geocentrism. It uses Geocentrism to make predictions that are correct everytime. We only know geocentrism to be flat-out wrong because of other observations and insights that we have gained in the last 500 years since Nicalaus Copernicus, Tyco Brahe, and Johannes Kepler. However, if we were in the 1st Century BC with the available information at the time, we would have had more scientific evidence of geocentrism then, than what we have for anthropogenic global warming today.
The rest of your blasting away at science? I call BS.....
I'm not blasting away at science. If I am blasting away at anything, it is people who claim they have the final and definative answer with "Science proves....." and then they close their minds, when all they really have is inaccurate and incomplete models.
Blind Faith in Science Beware, because valid science can give wrong results. Valid reproducable observations that lead to a hypothesis and valid proven predictions does not make it "true". Based upon the Article, the Greeks used this to *accurately* predict the positions of planets. This meets all four steps of our modern scientific method.
1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena. The Greeks see the planets, moon, and sun move across the sky
2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. The Greeks form a geo-centric hypothosis "in which each body describes a circle (the epicycle) around a point that itself moves in a circle around the earth"
3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations. The Greeks build a mental model of the universe to predict where the the heavenly bodies will be in the sky and then build a device (computer model) that will execute their prediction.
4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments. The Greeks can run the machine over and over and every time come up with a reasonably accurate prediction that can be verified by going back and seeing that the phenomena conforms to the prediction of the computer model
So, does this mean that a geocentric universe was "proven" by science in the 1st century BC? We would say that was absurd because we have more information about the universe now than the Greeks had from just looking skyward. But how many other computer models and predictions do we take on faith as "science" which are based on incomplete information. Our best global warming climate models are extemely *inaccurate* compared to this relatively accurate device. Yet we accept the inaccurate model on faith and reject the accurate model that this device "proves".
What this device show is that you can have completely valid "science" and still be completely wrong because your information is almost never complete. Throw in some preconceptions, political or cultural prejudices, and the selective observations that are part of the human nature of the scientists and the the "science" is even more skewed.
And no, its not just "acient" science that is wrong. Roughly 20 years ago every medical scientist *knew* that stomach ulcers were caused by stress. Then some crackpot came along and suggested they were caused by a bacterial infection. The crackpot couldn't even get approval to run tests, so he experimented on himself. A few weeks ago that crackpot won the Nobel Prize. So how many of our accpeted "truths" are wrong?
But you can edit a PDF with the full $300 version of Acrobat. So, having a PDF does not in any sense mean that you have an "original and unaltered document" or any "certainty that the document is legitimate".
My bitch is that at $300 for editing capability, PDF is not much more "open" than MS-Office.
Microsoft's Yates said the company agrees with the adoption of XML but does not agree that the solution to "public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies."
Well XML is one thing, but PDF (which is the other half of the policy) is a fairly inflexable format for most people. Opening a pre-existing pdf document, edititing, and saving it is not a common-place operation for most office suites. Try googling "free pdf editor" or "gpl pdf editor". You will get links to a bunch trial pdf *writers* and a few evaluation versions of editors. I don't know of a completely free (as in not an evaluation version) PDF *editor*
My other bitch about pdf is that some morons don't know the difference between a scanned (i.e. picture of text without ocr) document that has been saved as pdf and a actual text document that has been written to pdf. Ofcourse, with the actual text, you can atleast highlight, copy, and paste into a new document. No such luck with the picture of text.
Either your cost estimate is incorrect, OR Wal-mart is only doing this at the wholesale level. If your estimate of a buck per tag is correct, then a RFID tag can not replace the bar code at the retail level.
If they are doing this at the warehouse/wholesale level, then a $1 tag on a pallet with 10 cases of 50 each cans of beans is reasonable (you're spreading 1 dollar over 500 retail units so per unit cost is like 1/5 penny).
Putting a tag on each retail unit however would get hugely expensive. In fact, it would be too expensive to pass on to the customers without the customers going over to the competition. Wal-mart's customer base is extremely price-sensitive and Wal-mart knows it
So I have to conclude that either Wal-mart has a way to mass-produce the tags for pennies each - OR- they only plan to do this at the wholesale level.
YellowTab is targeting wrong market s/b embedded
on
Ars Technica on Zeta 1.0
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
As I have commented previously, YellowTab is going about this the wrong way. They seem to be trying to market this as a general purpose desktop, but that is a hard market to break in to with incredibly strong established competitors (MS, Apple) and a generally conservative (i.e. not open to drastic change) base of potential desktop customers.
The low system specs and mulitmedia capabilities scream for this to be put into a TV-set-top box like a DVR or even a game console. The low system requirements might even be good on appliances, medical imaging, kiosks, and ATMs. I think they should be trying to sell their stuff to Sony, Panasonic, Scientific-Atlanta, Deibold, etc instead of trying to break into desktops. The desktop market is just a loosing proposition for them.
Vista was developed by the Government starting back in the late 70s - early 80s when the GPL was just a twinkle in Stallman's eye, as can be seen here. It is written in a near obsolete language called MUMPS. It was (and still is to some extent) accessed via VT100 telnet. A GUI and extra components were added in the 90s. Because it was developed by the Government, it is public domain. The OSS version is based on the Government's work.
I definitely do not think that having the root domains under control by the US government is a good idea
Why do you think that? Is the current system broke? Do you think the U.N., ICANN, or whoever is better equiped to do the job? Or do you just have a reflexive anti-U.S. Government bias?
The U.S. Commerce Department (and DARPA before them) has successfully guided the Internet throught explosive growth. The system that *they* constructed works and works beautifully (not perfectly... but pretty darn good, otherwise we wouldn't be able to have this conversation). Have you head the saying "If if ain't broke, don't fix it"?
It would have been nice if the Sun Java App Server could have become an Apache project instead of a CDDL project. It would have been a perfect match for Apache. But maybe that was asking for too much. Sun was very generous when they donated Tomcat to Apache back 1999 (and perhaps Sun's management thinks they were too generous since Tomcat forms the foundation for some products which now compete with Sun)
Yes, I know that Geronimo is working under Apache to do an app server too, but they are still have a long way to go to be production ready.
Note to those who become involved with the new GlassFish project. If you ever get any leverage with Sun, please ask for an Apache License.
Perhaps when it is closer to the horizon, your line-of-sight to the moon also follows closer to the surface of the Earth. Because the atmosphere is denser at the surface, the denser atmophere has a greater lens effect?
No? Well, it was just a shot-from-the-hip thought.
Include a hash or digital signature in the image file, something not readily detechtable to the naked eye but machine decernable (like a flipped bit or pixel every 100 pixels). Not completely foolproof, but could serve as a way verify origin of the photo.
Well, maybe not as robust or developed as Cygwin or Unix Svcs, but the concept is the same. A unix environment avaiable on a non-unix platform.
I tried this out on mirrordot and was impressed (even if it is still in proof-of-concept stage). It would be neat to have a unix environment anywhere you have an internet connection. I could also see it being used as a extremely portable virtual machine for simple applications.
I checked it out on Mirrordot. Very Impressive. I was able to create a directory, touch a file, and used vi to insert and save text, then copy it to another file. The shell even appears to be scriptable
"OS" is probably a misnomer, it would be probably better to call it a Write-Once/Run Anywhere Virtual Machine. A JS-based virtual machine might be kinda neat. It would probably never be as robust and general-purpose as JAVA, but could be useful for simple applications.
The should try for the embedded market
on
Zeta Goes Gold
·
· Score: 1
It looks to me that YellowTab is going about this the wrong way. They seem to be trying to market this as a general purpose desktop, but that is a hard market to break in to with incredibly strong established competitors (MS, Apple).
The low system specs and mulitmedia capabilities scream for this to be put into a TV-set-top box like a DVR. The low system requirements might even be good on appliances, medical imaging, and kiosks. I think they should be trying to sell their stuff to Sony, Panasonic, Scientific-Atlanta, etc instead of trying to break into desktops.
Until Windows gets a powerful toolset, its CLI will never beat UNIX. The shell itself is just a glue for the toolset. When I set down at a unix, linux, or bsd box (even a barebones minimal install), I will find by default things like grep, awk, sed, zcat, tar, mail, and probably perl (to mention just a few). Add in the power of pipes and a good scriptable shell to glue it all togather and a unix user is superman compared to a windows user. I don't know how many times I've found myself sitting at a Windows box and wanted to parse and rearange some ascii text report only to have to fire up notepad and start editing line-by-line. A unix box would have let me pipe it through awk or sed and be done with it in seconds.
As far as I am concerned, the only saving grace for Windows is ActiveState perl. Maybe MS can impletment a default native perl intrepreter. Now that would rock.
Slashdot Mirror
I sorta find that astounding (not that I have a 386 around myself). Oh well, the world has moved on.
I think the world's one and only existant SCO Linux license might be worth something as a novelty/history-of-computer item on ebay. So maybe the license fee (what was it? like $700?) would be an investment.
For all the talk about the evil monopoly, the fact is that the confortable non-competative enviroment of the monopoly allowed AT&T to subsidize all the cool research at Bell Labs. Now-a-days, the ultra-competitve, cost-cutting, outsourcing-to-save-a-dime way of business would never tolerate a "dead-weight" research division that wasn't turning a quick direct profit. The modern business model of pursuit of a quick profit and "enhancing shareholder value" means that the kind of long term research done by Bell Labs is a thing of the distant past.
When was the last time that Lucent (the sucessor to Bell Labs) invented anything that was totally groundbreaking like the transitor or UNIX? Never. They are too busy trying to stay afloat (by selling switches and equipment) to fund any significant research.
I wouldn't expect SBC/AT&T to be any different. Either they will only think about quick profits -OR- they will claim (perhaps trufully) that they don't have the cashflow to fund extra research. From SBC Labs' website that you linked to, it looks like their proudest accomplishment was developing a DSL self-install kit. Whoopie.
A Patent is a grant of property from the Sovereign (i.e. the legal state, whether that be the "People" or the "Crown" or the "Republic"). Most people define "property" as having a set of legal (usually exclusive) rights to possess, enjoy, and dispose of some thing. All property flows from the Sovereign. The Sovereign either grants it directly (as in a patent for land or intellectual property) or he recognizes it through enacting laws. The "Real" in real estate does not mean true, but litteraly "Royal". You may like to think that its *your* property because of some moral reason (like you earned it or made it yourself), but legally it is only yours because the Sovereign says so through his laws.
Since property and patents are at the pleasure of the Sovereign, the Sovereign is free to revoke it at any time. This is called escheat. In fact, if you die without an heir, your property automatically escheats to the Sovereign.
So, a Soveriegn of a State, can legally revoke any patent of his own granting at any time. Other than because of a treaty obligation, a Sovereign State need not recognize or allow a Patent granted by another state.
Here in the US, our Founders were well aware (and sometimes the personal victims) of the abuses and escheats at the hands of the British Sovereign. So all the above was modified by our constitution which says that property may not be seized except with "due process of law". The Congress has also set up horrible "patent and copyright" laws. Obviously, Taiwan has different laws.
I completely agree with you that a good scientist knows that new theories "supplant older theories as newer, better, more accurate observations are made". Good science always accepts a certain healthly level of uncertainty and provisionalness. However, there are a lot people who forget that and then go on to make far reaching claims and absolute conclusions based on "scientific" computer models. I cringe when somebody with an agenda (political, scientific, social) says "We *must* immediately do $action because scientists have proven $dramatic_result by conducting $flawed_computer_model"
My illustrative point about Global Warming is that when the hypothosis was formed about 10-15 years ago, the computer models gave certain predictions of where global temperatures would be now. Those predictions were wildly inaccurate. Granted, newer models used today are more complex and contain more data than the old models, but given the long lead time of observations, we can have no more confidence in their accurancy than the ten year old models. These models haven't even risen to the level of "best-fit" for accurately describing or predicting phenomena. Yet, you have people running around spouting off about such-and-such computer models predicts so-and-so. Because the models are unproven (and indeed, the immediate anticedants that they modify were shown to be wildly wrong) their trust of the anthropogenic warming models equates to little more than "faith" under color of science.
The Antikythera device is based on the theory of Geocentrism. It uses Geocentrism to make predictions that are correct everytime. We only know geocentrism to be flat-out wrong because of other observations and insights that we have gained in the last 500 years since Nicalaus Copernicus, Tyco Brahe, and Johannes Kepler. However, if we were in the 1st Century BC with the available information at the time, we would have had more scientific evidence of geocentrism then, than what we have for anthropogenic global warming today.
I think that is a cautionary tale.
So, does this mean that a geocentric universe was "proven" by science in the 1st century BC? We would say that was absurd because we have more information about the universe now than the Greeks had from just looking skyward. But how many other computer models and predictions do we take on faith as "science" which are based on incomplete information. Our best global warming climate models are extemely *inaccurate* compared to this relatively accurate device. Yet we accept the inaccurate model on faith and reject the accurate model that this device "proves".
What this device show is that you can have completely valid "science" and still be completely wrong because your information is almost never complete. Throw in some preconceptions, political or cultural prejudices, and the selective observations that are part of the human nature of the scientists and the the "science" is even more skewed.
And no, its not just "acient" science that is wrong. Roughly 20 years ago every medical scientist *knew* that stomach ulcers were caused by stress. Then some crackpot came along and suggested they were caused by a bacterial infection. The crackpot couldn't even get approval to run tests, so he experimented on himself. A few weeks ago that crackpot won the Nobel Prize. So how many of our accpeted "truths" are wrong?
If it is done on their own time and dime, then they should register a copyright and use it to bargin a payraise/promotion.
If they are doing it on company time, then it probably belongs to the company, and they are probably screwed.
But you can edit a PDF with the full $300 version of Acrobat. So, having a PDF does not in any sense mean that you have an "original and unaltered document" or any "certainty that the document is legitimate".
My bitch is that at $300 for editing capability, PDF is not much more "open" than MS-Office.
Well XML is one thing, but PDF (which is the other half of the policy) is a fairly inflexable format for most people. Opening a pre-existing pdf document, edititing, and saving it is not a common-place operation for most office suites. Try googling "free pdf editor" or "gpl pdf editor". You will get links to a bunch trial pdf *writers* and a few evaluation versions of editors. I don't know of a completely free (as in not an evaluation version) PDF *editor*
My other bitch about pdf is that some morons don't know the difference between a scanned (i.e. picture of text without ocr) document that has been saved as pdf and a actual text document that has been written to pdf. Ofcourse, with the actual text, you can atleast highlight, copy, and paste into a new document. No such luck with the picture of text.
Either your cost estimate is incorrect, OR Wal-mart is only doing this at the wholesale level. If your estimate of a buck per tag is correct, then a RFID tag can not replace the bar code at the retail level.
If they are doing this at the warehouse/wholesale level, then a $1 tag on a pallet with 10 cases of 50 each cans of beans is reasonable (you're spreading 1 dollar over 500 retail units so per unit cost is like 1/5 penny).
Putting a tag on each retail unit however would get hugely expensive. In fact, it would be too expensive to pass on to the customers without the customers going over to the competition. Wal-mart's customer base is extremely price-sensitive and Wal-mart knows it
So I have to conclude that either Wal-mart has a way to mass-produce the tags for pennies each - OR- they only plan to do this at the wholesale level.
As I have commented previously, YellowTab is going about this the wrong way. They seem to be trying to market this as a general purpose desktop, but that is a hard market to break in to with incredibly strong established competitors (MS, Apple) and a generally conservative (i.e. not open to drastic change) base of potential desktop customers.
The low system specs and mulitmedia capabilities scream for this to be put into a TV-set-top box like a DVR or even a game console. The low system requirements might even be good on appliances, medical imaging, kiosks, and ATMs. I think they should be trying to sell their stuff to Sony, Panasonic, Scientific-Atlanta, Deibold, etc instead of trying to break into desktops. The desktop market is just a loosing proposition for them.
Vista was developed by the Government starting back in the late 70s - early 80s when the GPL was just a twinkle in Stallman's eye, as can be seen here. It is written in a near obsolete language called MUMPS. It was (and still is to some extent) accessed via VT100 telnet. A GUI and extra components were added in the 90s. Because it was developed by the Government, it is public domain. The OSS version is based on the Government's work.
and has the most net users by far
The U.S. Commerce Department (and DARPA before them) has successfully guided the Internet throught explosive growth. The system that *they* constructed works and works beautifully (not perfectly... but pretty darn good, otherwise we wouldn't be able to have this conversation). Have you head the saying "If if ain't broke, don't fix it"?
It would have been nice if the Sun Java App Server could have become an Apache project instead of a CDDL project. It would have been a perfect match for Apache. But maybe that was asking for too much. Sun was very generous when they donated Tomcat to Apache back 1999 (and perhaps Sun's management thinks they were too generous since Tomcat forms the foundation for some products which now compete with Sun)
Yes, I know that Geronimo is working under Apache to do an app server too, but they are still have a long way to go to be production ready.
Note to those who become involved with the new GlassFish project. If you ever get any leverage with Sun, please ask for an Apache License.
Perhaps when it is closer to the horizon, your line-of-sight to the moon also follows closer to the surface of the Earth. Because the atmosphere is denser at the surface, the denser atmophere has a greater lens effect?
No? Well, it was just a shot-from-the-hip thought.
lol..my point exactlee
and grammer too. Time to hire a proof-reader.
Include a hash or digital signature in the image file, something not readily detechtable to the naked eye but machine decernable (like a flipped bit or pixel every 100 pixels). Not completely foolproof, but could serve as a way verify origin of the photo.
So if you want to run a server on the sly, just observe which IPs the ISP uses to scan. Then drop connections from those IPs or that block.
Well, maybe not as robust or developed as Cygwin or Unix Svcs, but the concept is the same. A unix environment avaiable on a non-unix platform.
I tried this out on mirrordot and was impressed (even if it is still in proof-of-concept stage). It would be neat to have a unix environment anywhere you have an internet connection. I could also see it being used as a extremely portable virtual machine for simple applications.
I checked it out on Mirrordot. Very Impressive. I was able to create a directory, touch a file, and used vi to insert and save text, then copy it to another file. The shell even appears to be scriptable
"OS" is probably a misnomer, it would be probably better to call it a Write-Once/Run Anywhere Virtual Machine. A JS-based virtual machine might be kinda neat. It would probably never be as robust and general-purpose as JAVA, but could be useful for simple applications.
It looks to me that YellowTab is going about this the wrong way. They seem to be trying to market this as a general purpose desktop, but that is a hard market to break in to with incredibly strong established competitors (MS, Apple).
The low system specs and mulitmedia capabilities scream for this to be put into a TV-set-top box like a DVR. The low system requirements might even be good on appliances, medical imaging, and kiosks. I think they should be trying to sell their stuff to Sony, Panasonic, Scientific-Atlanta, etc instead of trying to break into desktops.
Until Windows gets a powerful toolset, its CLI will never beat UNIX. The shell itself is just a glue for the toolset. When I set down at a unix, linux, or bsd box (even a barebones minimal install), I will find by default things like grep, awk, sed, zcat, tar, mail, and probably perl (to mention just a few). Add in the power of pipes and a good scriptable shell to glue it all togather and a unix user is superman compared to a windows user. I don't know how many times I've found myself sitting at a Windows box and wanted to parse and rearange some ascii text report only to have to fire up notepad and start editing line-by-line. A unix box would have let me pipe it through awk or sed and be done with it in seconds.
As far as I am concerned, the only saving grace for Windows is ActiveState perl. Maybe MS can impletment a default native perl intrepreter. Now that would rock.