What makes you think BSD folk won't accept GPLd code?
From the FreeBSD contributions HowTO:
When working with large amounts of code, the touchy subject of copyrights also invariably comes up. Acceptable copyrights for code included in FreeBSD are:
1.The BSD copyright. This copyright is most preferred due to its ``no strings attached'' nature and general attractiveness to commercial enterprises. Far from discouraging such commercial use, the FreeBSD Project actively encourages such participation by commercial interests who might eventually be inclined to invest something of their own into FreeBSD.
2.The GNU Public License, or ``GPL''. This license is not quite as popular with us due to the amount of extra effort demanded of anyone using the code for commercial purposes, but given the sheer quantity of GPL'd code we currently require (compiler, assembler, text formatter, etc) it would be silly to refuse additional contributions under this license. Code under the GPL also goes into a different part of the tree, that being/sys/gnu or/usr/src/gnu, and is therefore easily identifiable to anyone for whom the GPL presents a problem.
No problems here.
Still, it would be nice if folks really let their code be free.
Since you're looking at this from a business perspective (and who can blame you for that? nobody wants to starve on the street), do you realize that you have a delicate tradeoff to make here?
Namely, will revenues recovered by shutting down Napster make up for the revenues lost by pissing off a big chunk of your fanbase?
As far as I can see, the answer is "no". Apparently, your answer is "yes". So I'd love to know how you arrived at that answer.
This, of course, is Christianity. Think of others, not yourself; walk a mile in another man's shoes, blah blah blah. But Stallman is also an atheist.
Judaism proscribes pork.
I don't eat pork.
Am I thus a Jew (or a Hindu, or a Muslim)?
Clue-by-four for ya: it is entirely possible to make ethical arguments, and even come to the same conclusions that an organized religion might have come to, without having to posit the existance of a Big White Guy In The Sky.
Having started on the ZX-81 myself, I must point out that it had a princely 1K of RAM. Oh, and the video buffer came out of that, so you actually had ~700 bytes of useable memory.
One of the very finest bits of hacking I've ever seen was the hero who managed to squeeze a working chess game into that. The computer played a lousy game, but by God, it played!
I used to work for a certain company that makes educational software and management systems for K-12 schools.
I really thought we were helping kids and improving the state of the world.
Then I visited a few classrooms.
And in every case, it was used for glorified babysitting. And not very good babysitting, at that; the teachers are untrained, the hardware is uniformly awful, the networks are worse. I recall a lab in an elementary school where during a single class (40 odd minutes, of which at least 10 are pissed away marching kids in/getting them to sit/logging into the network/etc) over half of the PCs locked up. I (as a representative of the company that was providing the software, and as a human being) was utterly appalled. The teacher's response? "Oh, yeah, that happens. We just have the kids hit the power button". What the hell were those kids learning? How to hit Control-Alt-Delete (actually not a bad trick for a grade schooler)? But nobody cared, because they were quiet.
Did I mention that this software cost at least six figures? Never mind the hardware? And it wasn't just the particular company I worked for, either; we were honestly better than the competition (which, by the way, finally bought the first company in order to bury the superior (though still crappy) product).
Let's just say that my kid will be going to private Catholic school, even though I have no love for the Catholic (or any) religion. And if I ever find out that they are budgeting for PCs when there's one decent teacher out there looking for a job, I'll be at the school board meetings screaming.
Re:Word misuse by the word-sleuth
on
Author Unknown
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· Score: 1
Webster's gives invaluable as "valuable beyond estimation : PRICELESS".
Given that David's assistance clearly led to Ted's arrest sooner than "forensic linguistics" could have, quite probably saving lives in the process, I think this is a fine choice of adjectives. It certainly is not "blatent misuse".
If I can read the legalese right, this means that the Patent Office is in violation of patent 5,991,780, since their own web server is a "Computer based system, method, and computer program product for selectively displaying patent text and images".
Embedded machines are not the only domain for this chip.
First off, I was replying in the context of the original message on this thread, which said Sun was going to take over the embedded world with this chip (this also happens to be my domain of expertise). And I'll stand by my arguments in that context. As for the others...
Java... is quite succesfull on the server
People keep saying that; perhaps I'm overlooking the obvious, but I sure don't see this. Can you offer examples (really, I'm not trying to be a smartass here; the server apps I see tend to be large database apps with a SQL backend and various frontends (perl/tcl/HTML/Visual Basic). I'd love to know where these Java apps are going.
JIT is not the same as interpreted (which you are suggesting).
I'm aware that this isn't a JVM on a chip (that would be the picoJava chip line). However, JIT, by definition, doesn't care what the back end is. So if JIT is the solution, why do we need this beast at all?
One of those optimizations could be discovering paralellism. And its exactly this type of optimizations that is beneficial on a MAJC architecture.
If you're looking for paralleism in the instruction stream, we call that pipelining. This is not a new idea. If you're looking at a higher level, that becomes a function of the compiler, which again is independant of the back end.
Sun's claims that this architecture will benefit from multi-threading seem to revolve around their catchily named "Space-Time Computing" (which translates into speculative execution; again, not a new idea) and high cache coherency (always a good idea, which is why Intel and Motorola already have solutions; they are however honest about them and don't pretend that they will scale to hundreds of processors).
In short, all the claims they make about benefitting from multi-threading can be equally applied to other CPUs. What's left is marketing spew, positioning this as "Java-optimized". Which sure isn't going to help them in the market I know.
You seem to be under the impression that its not going well with SUN at this moment.
Things look good right now (hell, I'm typing this on a Solaris workstation!). But I don't see a good future; as I said in my original message, they're under attack on all sides, and if this is their response (let's take on Intel and Motorola!), I don't see a rosy future.
Linux doesn't have to be a threat to companies like SUN. SUN gets its most revenue from hardware, not from software.
It's Solaris that sells the hardware. Price/ performance for Sun hardware is miserable. As an example, my development group recently built a proof-of-concept 16-node Linux cluster using off the shelf parts (el-cheapo K6 motherboards) which costs 10% of the price of the Sun Enterprise server it's competing with, and performs about 25% faster. If that's not a threat, I don't know what is.
As an embedded developer, I can heartily say: not bloody likely.
Would you risk the future of your company on a processor that is optimized for an interpreted language (ahh, memories of old Wang minis with BusinessBASIC CPUs!)?
They had a shot at the embedded market with the microSPARC. They missed badly.
Sun needs to pick a direction, and quickly. SGI is hot on their tail in the high-end workstation / super-server market. Linux / FreeBSD is eating away at their mindshare in the ISP / internet market. Motorola is killing them in the embedded market.
Oh yeah, the Javastation is going to save them. Sure.
Just about as likely as me going to my boss and suggesting building a system around a mutant CPU from this drowning company.
First, I'm not a lawyer. So please ignore anything I have to say.
That aside, I really doubt these folks want a fight. They are legally obligated to protect their trademark. What are they going to get out of suing you? Bad publicity and lawyers fees?
So give then an excuse to back off. That way, they can say they did their bit to defend their trademark, and they leave you alone.
The obvious excuse is to invoke common carrier status. Point out that you do not create this content, you are simply providing a medium to disseminate it. If you start editing/deleting messages, you just lost that status. Which would be very bad from a liability point of view, because it would open you to lawsuits just like this one.
You might also want to remove the reference to "trigger-happy lawyers". No need to antagonize 'em. Don't assume they're the enemy until they prove it.
>Each observation collapses the wave function, >resetting the clock, and it is possible by this >means to delay indefinitely the expected >transition to the lower state...
So if you watch a pot closely enough, it really will never boil?
A pretty generic solution I've used with success in the past is to use the COMT serial port-to-telnet redirector (which has grown up to be "Dialout/IP", from Tactical Software) with a homegrown telnet-to-modem server on the server side (there's apparently an open-source server side solution called sredird available now that would handle the server side of this).
This gives the WinTel client a virtual modem to play with. Then you can use any fax/communications software with it (WinFax Pro worked fine).
Slashdot Mirror
From the FreeBSD contributions HowTO:
No problems here.
Still, it would be nice if folks really let their code be free.
You forgot the step where Corel buys the shattered hulk of the original company for no apparent reason.
Since you're looking at this from a business perspective (and who can blame you for that? nobody wants to starve on the street), do you realize that you have a delicate tradeoff to make here?
Namely, will revenues recovered by shutting down Napster make up for the revenues lost by pissing off a big chunk of your fanbase?
As far as I can see, the answer is "no". Apparently, your answer is "yes". So I'd love to know how you arrived at that answer.
This, of course, is Christianity. Think of others, not yourself; walk a mile in another man's shoes, blah blah blah.
But Stallman is also an atheist.
Judaism proscribes pork.
I don't eat pork.
Am I thus a Jew (or a Hindu, or a Muslim)?
Clue-by-four for ya: it is entirely possible to make ethical arguments, and even come to the same conclusions that an organized religion might have come to, without having to posit the existance of a Big White Guy In The Sky.
Obviously written by someone who has never been exposed to APL, Snobol, 90% of Forth code or any of these languages.
Believe me, there are bad languages. VB probably isn't one of them, though I'm not qualified to offer an opinion (having never used it).
Boy, that's an impressive moral argument!
"Mom and dad probably won't catch me, so that makes it OK!"
At least it corresponds nicely with your username.
Having started on the ZX-81 myself, I must point out that it had a princely 1K of RAM. Oh, and the video buffer came out of that, so you actually had ~700 bytes of useable memory.
One of the very finest bits of hacking I've ever seen was the hero who managed to squeeze a
working chess game into that. The computer played a lousy game, but by God, it played!
I used to work for a certain company that makes educational software and management systems for K-12 schools.
I really thought we were helping kids and improving the state of the world.
Then I visited a few classrooms.
And in every case, it was used for glorified babysitting. And not very good babysitting, at that; the teachers are untrained, the hardware is uniformly awful, the networks are worse. I recall a lab in an elementary school where during a single class (40 odd minutes, of which at least 10 are pissed away marching kids in/getting them to sit/logging into the network/etc) over half of the PCs locked up. I (as a representative of the company that was providing the software, and as a human being) was utterly appalled. The teacher's response? "Oh, yeah, that happens. We just have the kids hit the power button". What the hell were those kids learning? How to hit Control-Alt-Delete (actually not a bad trick for a grade schooler)? But nobody cared, because they were quiet.
Did I mention that this software cost at least six figures? Never mind the hardware? And it wasn't just the particular company I worked for, either; we were honestly better than the competition (which, by the way, finally bought the first company in order to bury the superior (though still crappy) product).
Let's just say that my kid will be going to private Catholic school, even though I have no love for the Catholic (or any) religion. And if I ever find out that they are budgeting for PCs when there's one decent teacher out there looking for a job, I'll be at the school board meetings screaming.
Webster's gives invaluable as "valuable beyond estimation : PRICELESS".
Given that David's assistance clearly led to Ted's arrest sooner than "forensic linguistics" could have, quite probably saving lives in the process, I think this is a fine choice of adjectives. It certainly is not "blatent misuse".
Thanks for playing.
Well, almost.
If I can read the legalese right, this means that the Patent Office is in violation of patent 5,991,780, since their own web server is a "Computer based system, method, and computer program product for selectively displaying patent text and images".
Sorry about the slow response...
... is quite succesfull on the server
Embedded machines are not the only domain for this chip.
First off, I was replying in the context of the original message on this thread, which said Sun was going to take over the embedded world with this chip (this also happens to be my domain of expertise). And I'll stand by my arguments in that context. As for the others...
Java
People keep saying that; perhaps I'm overlooking the obvious, but I sure don't see this. Can you offer examples (really, I'm not trying to be a smartass here; the server apps I see tend to be large database apps with a SQL backend and various frontends (perl/tcl/HTML/Visual Basic). I'd love to know where these Java apps are going.
JIT is not the same as interpreted (which you are suggesting).
I'm aware that this isn't a JVM on a chip (that would be the picoJava chip line). However, JIT, by definition, doesn't care what the back end is. So if JIT is the solution, why do we need this beast at all?
One of those optimizations could be discovering paralellism. And its exactly this type of optimizations that is beneficial on a MAJC architecture.
If you're looking for paralleism in the instruction stream, we call that pipelining. This is not a new idea. If you're looking at a higher level, that becomes a function of the compiler, which again is independant of the back end.
Sun's claims that this architecture will benefit from multi-threading seem to revolve around their catchily named "Space-Time Computing" (which translates into speculative execution; again, not a new idea) and high cache coherency (always a good idea, which is why Intel and Motorola already have solutions; they are however honest about them and don't pretend that they will scale to hundreds of processors).
In short, all the claims they make about benefitting from multi-threading can be equally applied to other CPUs. What's left is marketing spew, positioning this as "Java-optimized". Which sure isn't going to help them in the market I know.
You seem to be under the impression that its not going well with SUN at this moment.
Things look good right now (hell, I'm typing this on a Solaris workstation!). But I don't see a good future; as I said in my original message, they're under attack on all sides, and if this is their response (let's take on Intel and Motorola!), I don't see a rosy future.
Linux doesn't have to be a threat to companies like SUN. SUN gets its most revenue from hardware, not from software.
It's Solaris that sells the hardware. Price/ performance for Sun hardware is miserable. As an example, my development group recently built a proof-of-concept 16-node Linux cluster using off the shelf parts (el-cheapo K6 motherboards) which costs 10% of the price of the Sun Enterprise server it's competing with, and performs about 25% faster. If that's not a threat, I don't know what is.
Probably your boss won't consult you for this.
Truth in that; I'm more of a software guy.
As an embedded developer, I can heartily say: not bloody likely.
Would you risk the future of your company on a processor that is optimized for an interpreted language (ahh, memories of old Wang minis with BusinessBASIC CPUs!)?
They had a shot at the embedded market with the microSPARC. They missed badly.
Sun needs to pick a direction, and quickly. SGI is hot on their tail in the high-end workstation / super-server market. Linux / FreeBSD is eating away at their mindshare in the ISP / internet market. Motorola is killing them in the embedded market.
Oh yeah, the Javastation is going to save them. Sure.
Just about as likely as me going to my boss and suggesting building a system around a mutant CPU from this drowning company.
First, I'm not a lawyer. So please ignore anything I have to say.
That aside, I really doubt these folks want a fight. They are legally obligated to protect their trademark. What are they going to get out of suing you? Bad publicity and lawyers fees?
So give then an excuse to back off. That way, they can say they did their bit to defend their trademark, and they leave you alone.
The obvious excuse is to invoke common carrier status. Point out that you do not create this content, you are simply providing a medium to disseminate it. If you start editing/deleting messages, you just lost that status. Which would be very bad from a liability point of view, because it would open you to lawsuits just like this one.
You might also want to remove the reference to "trigger-happy lawyers". No need to antagonize 'em. Don't assume they're the enemy until they prove it.
>Each observation collapses the wave function, ..
>resetting the clock, and it is possible by this
>means to delay indefinitely the expected
>transition to the lower state.
So if you watch a pot closely enough, it really will never boil?
A pretty generic solution I've used with success in the past is to use the COMT serial port-to-telnet redirector (which has grown up to be "Dialout/IP", from Tactical Software) with a homegrown telnet-to-modem server on the server side (there's apparently an open-source server side solution called sredird available now that would handle the server side of this).
This gives the WinTel client a virtual modem to play with. Then you can use any fax/communications software with it (WinFax Pro worked fine).